Capita Insurance Services, the UK's leading provider of business support services to the insurance market expects to reap benefits in the range of £20 to 40 million during the next five to ten years as a result of its implementation of the SAP Claims Management and CRM solutions.

"We are the first firm within the UK and Europe to successfully implement SAP Claims Management along with SAP CRM and at a very conservative level we have seen efficiencies of around about 20 to 30 percent in productivity alone in terms of having SAP effect a claim on a cradle-to-grave basis. We don't have to touch it that many times now." said Sal Laher IT director of the Capita Group. Laher's primary role is to focus on Capita Insurance Services, which is responsible for £180 of revenue, 4,000 staff and has 160 different clients in the insurance industry.

Because Capita operates in many different locations and has several different call centers, it has sometimes taken a claim in one location and physically faxed it to another location, Laher said.

"We have actually known to have touched a claim five times before it has been physically dealt with," he said.

The company, which has grown through acquisition, chose SAP in part because it needed a system that would integrate the array of legacy systems that the company has acquired. The company had as many as 90 different databases and six different claims applications, Laher said. In addition, as a business process outsourcer to the insurance industry, Capita needed to be able to demonstrate its value proposition and it felt SAP would help it build a strategic platform as well as help the company devise a single way of managing finances.

"With four or five major call centers for insurance customers, SAP CRM has allowed us to build a workflow mechanism from the point of inception of a call to flow all the way through final claims papers," Laher said.

The SAP solutions are powered by the SAP Netweaver platform, which Laher said facilitates the company's ability to pull the type of data it needs from company systems.

"It is absolutely key as a business process outsourcer to have management information that reported on the number of claims we were processing, the number of claims we are making and of course our customers are measuring us on how quickly we have SLAs to turnaround their claims and how we are reserving their payment funds and exactly how we are dealing with their customer inquiries," Laher said. "The SAP Business Intelligence warehouse allows us to generate that information."