Process Reviews

Do you know exactly where your problems lie?

There are often many different elements to actuarial reporting processes - whether it's a full year-end reporting process, business planning, or even just pricing and profit testing or production of ad-hoc management reports.

Often it's not clear exactly where the problem lies, but they may result from factors such as:

• Lack of understanding within the company of tools and processes, for example because of poor documentation, key man dependencies, or legacy systems from old products or previous acquisitions

• A "spaghetti" of interlinking models (e.g. because of proliferation of spreadsheets over time or legacy models)

• Legacy unused code in models, which no-one's quite sure whether or how to remove

• Out of model adjustments building up over time, or other ancillary processes building up around core systems without clear development control

• Confused hand-offs between different teams meaning responsibilities aren't clear.

Review your processes - understand what is needed

Our process reviews begin by understanding your business needs, and then going on to assess the quality of the existing tools and processes around them, against those needs and the key criteria of Robustness, Speed and Security. We will also look at how processes are affected by the structure of teams and any hand-offs with other teams outside of your departments where relevant.

At the end of the review we will provide you with a report showing the areas of strength and weaknesses we have identified, with options as to how you might choose to address the weaknesses and a high-level cost benefit analysis. You can then use this to either implement the changes internally, engage us to do the implementation of changes, or resource elsewhere.

Our approach

The typical approach we would take to a review is to:

• LISTEN to management, operational teams and other stakeholders

• ASK the right questions

• ANALYSE the models and tools used

• OBSERVE how the teams function in practice

• READ the documentation

• UNDERSTAND how it all fits together.