Deutsche Allegemeinversicherung (dav) Case Study

Case Abstract

Deutsche Allegemeinversicherung (DAV) was a global leader in the insurance industry, writing nearly DM 48 billion in premiums in 1996 in over 32 countries. Its strengths were the breadth of its products which included health, property, and life insurance in addition to its disability income protection. Managers in other firms throughout the industry attributed DAV's success to two key factors: sound, traditional insurance management; and outstanding customer service. Its exceptional group of risks managers provided a unique leadership dimension to the organization. As the insurance market was evolving, DAV's management became aware that in order to maintain their dominant position, they would need to compete on the quality of the service they provided.

Strategy

As insurance was progressively becoming a commodity, DAV was faced with the task of distinguishing itself from its competitors. Quality in customer service was acknowledged as the key element in DAV's strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors. Frank Schoeck, the head of operations at DAV Customer Service Group identified delivering "hassle-free" customer service as a key element of meeting or exceeding customer expectations for quality of service. An important part of delivering this quality of service was their ability to process and retrieve information without mistakes and in a timely manner. New customer service depended heavily upon accurate data entry of applications, which even with the current technology, still required an extensive amount of manual labor. In order to control costs and provide excellent customer service, DAV wanted to measure and improve data entry accuracy. Because of the unreliability of their current data, Annette Kluck head of Operations Development, hired consultant Hans-Jorg Schoss who recommended that a manufacturing-style Statistical Process Control (SPC) measurement and improvement system called PMV be used. PMV was rolled out in May 1995 and managers were given a month to get their departments together, develop the initial set of measures and build a sampling checklist.

Structure

DAV tested the PMV process in its 15 departments for a period of six months. DAV employed over 2,000 people at three primary site; Munchen, Kkoln and Hamburg. The Divisions within DAV included Systems, Retail Processing Support, Life Insurance Operations, Retail Transaction Processing, Customer Communications Division, and Customer Problem Resolution. Because of increased volatility and rising costs of permanent employees DAV managers had recently increased the proportion of temporary employees to be more flexible during business downturns. One of the complicating factors in running DAV's distributed operation was a corporate mandate for "same-day" processing. Customers