Aon Brazil CRS uses Power BI, lowers costs 8%, deployment time by 80% with Power Apps, Power Automate workflows

Aon exists to shape decisions for the better—to protect the lives of people around the world. With actionable analytic insights, risk and human capital expertise, the company serves clients in 120 countries. Aon took steps to substantially improve enterprise tooling with the capability to automate broking and claims processing. Aon wanted to eliminate the need to manually triage thousands of spam communications. It needed to orchestrate workflows to automatically parse and process claims and broking routines to improve organizational efficiencies. The company adopted Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI and has gained concrete benefits by automating with Power Platform. Aon Brazil CRS has now realized automated broking, claims processing, claims tracking and improved data management capabilities. 

Manually triaging thousands of communications

Wishing to improve its ability to process complex communications, Aon required a unified case-processing tool to assign work to team members, monitor analytics, and implement a sound data governance strategy. In managing communications between clients and insurance carriers, incoming cases were not captured automatically, but manually assigned to team members for processing. To resolve cases, the team communicated with telephone calls and emails. The manual system in place was prone to human error in a highly regulated industry. Incoming customer cases were captured and processed using several non-centralized, shared mailboxes. However, limited access permissions prevented team members from accessing shared mailboxes, and only a limited number of account executives had the required permissions to read emails, classify them, and attempt to resolve each client case. Not having end-to-end automation introduced risk, and a higher probability of errors that could lead to non-compliance with data protection and privacy regulations.

Integration and automation capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform

Aon worked with Microsoft to implement a solution that could save development team hours and lower costs. By building out an application using Power Apps, and adding automated flows with Power Automate, Aon was able to operate on a structured budget and faster timeline to build a solution and streamline formerly internal manual processes. 

The Power Platform solution was rolled out in January 2023 with a big bang deployment after a brief internal trial period. The team now uses Power Automate workflows to streamline the case resolution process, enabling real-time identification and assignment of claims to team members. The new process captures messages in Microsoft Outlook, shares them to a Microsoft SharePoint transactional database as a new case, then assigns a team member for resolution. Further workflow automations create unified visibility into the team's case load by parsing incoming cases by status, owner, type, associated clients, insurance type, and carrier. Cases are created, linked to, or reactivated in the workflow app, empowering employees to search, generate email responses, view case interaction data, and categorize by lead time and priority. There has been a significant improvement in tracking metrics for broking and claims data, with updates displayed in real-time visualizations within Power BI dashboards, empowering managers to monitor tasks and respond to team needs quicker. Now, with comprehensive data transparency, Aon leadership can make informed decisions to better manage overall system capacity and associated costs. "Microsoft was very important during the implementation and provided valuable insights into some of the problems we faced during deployment. The Microsoft team delivered outstanding technical guidance on the end-to-end automation solution that helped us improve deployment issues and performance," says Valdir Suzano Filho, Aon's Business Strategy Director.  

Efficiencies resulting in data transparency best practices

Using Power Automate to manage case processing promoted employee upskilling, increased team productivity, and resulted in organizational efficiencies for the company. With streamlined case management workflows, team members are now free to focus on more complex business issues, leading to increased production and improved SLA performance. With employees handling caseloads that require different competencies, the company avoided the additional cost of hiring and training more people. Automated workflows in Power Automate resulted in better data management and process tracking. The company's SLS app, a claim management tool, built with Power Apps, interacts with business logic in Power Automate, displays files in a SharePoint directory, and filters queries to the database. With auto-updates displayed in Power BI dashboards, the team has a comprehensive view of case resolution metrics, so they can track average lead time and case load per team member. "Power Automate was the most beneficial component of the solution," says Rohan Tiwari, IT Automation Platforms Owner. "Capabilities such as incoming case capture, case assignment, document management and mirroring functionalities in the SLA tool remove the need for work in two platforms simultaneously."

With a Power Platform solution, Aon realized important process efficiencies. The company implemented improved data governance best practices—and managed to avoid at least 8% of operating expenditures (headcount avoidance in comparison to budgeted costs), leveraging the capabilities of Power BI-orchestrated workflows. In a year's time, the solution has improved data management and process tracking procedures, saving the company time and money. Aon Brazil CRS also reduced deployment time 80% leveraging document management capabilities of Power Apps and automated workflows of Power Automate. Aon's 2023 – 2024 yearly results after implementing business logic rules in Power Automate are significant. A year after initial deployment, 40 rules of automatic assignment and 28 rules of automatic cancellation resulted in identifying and cancelling more than 20,000 redundant, time-consuming processes. Aggregate savings for the company equate to 8% percent of Aon Brazil CRS’s expense.

Next, the global company is developing a plan to leverage generative AI and Copilot in daily workflows. Possible use cases for the near future include email textual analysis, document composition, processing request for proposal (RFP) documents, and generating dashboards with estimates of predictive performance—capabilities delivered with Copilot in Power Platform. "The future of how we manage our data is even brighter with AI workflows. We look forward to even higher projected returns from business and engineering process improvements using components of artificial intelligence," says Business Infrastructure Executive Director, Sheila Garcia. 

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