AZL– enabling straight through processing

The challenge

AZL has a long history in pension management for the leading pension funds companies in The Netherlands. For these clients AZL fully executes the pension management and execution of services, processing millions of confidential transactions every day.

 

Traditionally, each team within AZL was accountable for several customers in their portfolio. For these accounts all operational processes were carried out by these teams. However, the variety in these processes for different customers is very limited. This situation has led to an organization that existed of multiple teams doing exactly the same type of work in parallel.

 

The solution

AZL has started a major change management project and restructured its departments to become process oriented. Now departments and teams have become responsible for the execution of a specific process instead of specific accounts. The different teams in a department were structured according to the process phases. They now became responsible for a specific execution process or set of processes for all AZL customers. Bizagi has been chosen as the operational platform to enable AZL to optimize and automate the processes in their organization. 

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Our team of analyst-developers has been working since 2018 as part of a project team together with both internal employees and external consultants, developers and testers. We developed the capabilities and processes that were defined by their internal business analysts as Subject Matter Experts. In close cooperation with these analysts and based on their functional designs, our developers configured the processes and implemented a fully process-driven business architecture.

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In fact, all building blocks of Bizagi come to life within AZL. The Work Portal is the foundation for employees to carry out their work. The processes model, designed in full BPMN, applies all the capabilities of Bizagi, including advanced integration with the company’s ERP application and online services.
 
Most of the processes are fully automated and are triggered by input files that are stored on AZL’s file system. Only in case of drop out, some cases are escalated in the work portal, requiring a specific human action (exception driven process). Because of this Bizagi acts as an orchestrator in a complex legacy IT landscape where the majority of process steps are automated, but critical human intervention will solve difficult cases.

 

The impact

AZL continuously upgrades its process portfolio to be part of the Bizagi platform. Up to now about 10 key processes have been automated with Bizagi. After two years, AZL has evaluated and audited the project and its deliverables in detail. The conclusion of the auditors is that the effect of this transition project is significant. Because of Bizagi, Straight Through Processing could really show its potential by shorter process lead times of 45% in average and a reduction of 70% in manual intervention in the first year. Based on this evaluation AZL has decided that the process development will be continued to roll out STP in the organization and achieve the maximum level of efficiency.