Enabling flexibility of business processes by compliance rules - a case study from the insurance industry

The Swiss insurance company Die Mobiliar creates insurance documents with a wizard application utilizing the Papyrus Communication and Process Platform. Based on predefined processes, wizards guide business users through document generation processes. Although wizards can be amended by business administrators to respond to changing requirements, a high degree of process automation restricts adaption to the rapidly changing insurance market due to rigidness and bureaucratic efforts. In our approach, the concept of compliance rules in combination with process redesign has been applied to enable flexibility for insurance processes. The original processes are split into predefined reusable sub-processes and a set of individual ad hoc tasks which can be added by the business users at runtime as they assess the current insurance client situation. Compliance rules guarantee overall process execution compliance whilst enabling the needed flexibility. The number of process templates can be reduced considerably to a few predefined core processes in combination with a set of ad hoc tasks. The flexibility achieved by this compliance-rule approach enables the adaptability of insurance processes by business users, from which the whole insurance industry can benefit.