Funeral Directors Life was founded in 1981 by a group of funeral directors who wanted to provide the best possible service to their families, including safe and secure options for their prepaid funerals. Since that time, Funeral Directors Life has grown to be one of the leading preneed providers in the nation. Yesterday, it was announced the company has implemented Hyland RPA to further automate claims and new business processes. Let’s learn the details.
Challenge
Prior to implementing Hyland RPA, Funeral Directors Life’s lean, eight-person new business processing team was responsible for closing more than 2,000 contracts per week. Often employees stayed past business hours to focus their efforts on finalizing contracts. Fortunately, the organization’s annual ‘Hack Week‘, where the insurance company investigated potential technology impacts and improvements for the business, provided an opportunity for developers to assess new solutions to solve challenges.
Solution
During the week, a lead developer put together a fully outlined proof-of-concept to automate new business processing, without adding headcount. Just a few weeks after presenting the strategy, Funeral Directors Life added five bots, integrated with its OnBase platform, that automatically surfaced information to settle 95 percent of incoming contracts. Within an additional month, there was an 88% return on bot investments and total elimination of lag time in line-of-business processing because systems are updated continuously throughout the day rather than settling at the end of the day.
Business Impact
As Funeral Directors Life has grown its new business by more than 70 percent over the last four years up to a projected $350 million in 2021, the end-to-end automation solution has made a substantial impact by automating over 20,000 hours of manual processes to date. By the end of 2021, executives expect that bots will complete roughly 90 percent of new business contracts, settling more than 2,000 contracts a week with the same amount of staff.
Testimonial
“Before investing in RPA we were looking into hiring additional staff to assist in time-consuming, manual processes. Instead, now our bots are handling the highly repetitive tasks, giving employees the ability to focus their time and effort on more important, high-value work that increases customer experience and service. From process design through bot management, the Hyland RPA solution is intuitive and fun. The integration between OnBase and Hyland RPA has helped us design the perfect new business system — there’s no way we could achieve the results we are today without both those assets.”
Kyle Swearingen, VP of development, Funeral Directors Life
