Deutsche Allgemeinversicherung - Case Study

Deutsche Allgemeinversicherung :  Case Study

Submitted to:  Robert Greene

Submitted by:  Christina Murphy

Date:  Oct 22, 2016

Table of Contents

Page 3:                    Executive Summary

Page 4:         Issues Identified

Page 5:         Environmental Root Causes and Analysis

Page 6:            Alternatives and Options

Page 7:                 Recommendations

Page 7:         Implementation

Page 8:         Monitor and Control

Executive Summary:

Deutsche Allgemeinversicherung (DAV) was founded in 1966 and has become the second largest insurance company in Germany and one of the largest in the world.  DAV operated about 51 percent of its business in Germany of which 60 percent comprised of retail insurance including, health and property insurance.  In addition, the offerings included life insurance, and disability income protection.  As the second largest firm in Germany, DAV was aware of its prominent position and had begun to think carefully about how to maintain that position as smaller insurance companies armed themselves to attack its primary markets.  DAV’s dominant advantage was the breadth of its offerings and its excellent group of insurance risk managers.  DAV needed a strategy to help keep its managers as they were aware that individual managers were movable assets.  They wanted to make sure that managers were valued as well as their customers.  Managers in other firms attributed DAV’s success to two key factors:  sound, traditional insurance management and outstanding customer service.  

Customer service was becoming an important tool for differentiating one firm from another.  Quality in customer service has progressively become a critical element in DAV’s strategy.  The company is looking to improve their process of documenting customer information in forms both filled out by the customer, as well as representatives.  Documents can have errors (as they often do) however, these errors aren’t necessarily all of the same importance to the company. An important part of delivering quality of service was their ability to process and retrieve information without mistakes and in a timely manner.  DAV in delivering its hassle free service to its customers was complicated by the size and locations of DAV offices.  There also was a corporate mandate for “same day” processing, where certain transactions were performed by the end of the working day in which customers requested them.

The challenge was to implement a relevant method which would yield improvements in the long run. DAV’s management questioned the integrity of their performance data.  They needed to get accuracy in their data before they could proceed with their improvement strategies.  To improve on its quality, DAV adopted a new quality improvement initiative called process measurement and improvement (PMV) headed by Annette Kluck.  This system was adopted from the manufacturing style of statistical process control (SPC) measurements and the goal is to use this statistical tool to improve current operations to be more efficient and help to differentiate DAV in the industry and maintain its position in the market place. Statistical Process control is an effective method of monitoring a process through the use of control charts.  It would involve using statistical techniques to measure and analyze the variation in processes.