Business process re-engineering and operational performance at UAP insurance company

Abstract

The business environment for the firms in the service industry such as insurance firms is continually changing in the context of the organizational competitiveness, organizational performance and operational performance. This creates a need to continually improve on operational processes due to growth of international trade, the customer assertiveness in demand for high quality services, rapid technological development, and shortened product life cycles. In order to cope with this changing business environment, the firms need to undertake an organizational change methodology such as Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). BPR aims to achieve improvements in the contemporary measure of performance that is cost, quality, service and speed. The aim of BPR is the redesigning of the work to better support organizational objectives while reducing on the cost implications. Therefore, the overall aim of BPR is delivering more value to the customer through rethinking of existing processes, use technology to improve data dissemination and decision making, redesigning the functional organization into cross-functional teams. This study aimed at examining the role of BPR on customer relationship management, cost management and operational efficiency at UAP insurance company. The study used the Resource Based View, Dynamic Capabilities Theory, and Human Capital Theory. Descriptive research design and structured questionnaires were utilized for data collection. In the context of the order of influence of BPR on operational performance metrics (in decreasing order): demonstration of flexibility in dealing with service requests actions, BPR helping UAP achieve customer promise, improvement in the turnaround timelines for services provision, simplification of operational processes and better coordination between branch based services and head office based services. In the context of the influence of BPR helping in Customer Relationship Management aspects, the order of significance in ascending order was reception of useful alerts, improvement in the tracking of complaints, simplification of operational process leading customer loyalty, improvement in customer acquisition process, and consistency in service delivery. The order of importance (in increasing significance) in the context of BPR helping in Operational Efficiency metrics; the ability to serve a higher number of customers with fewer head count, faster product development, agility in reacting to market environment, improvement of the workflow processes, and provision of better results in service requests.