Hazell Carr recently assisted a well known provider of long term savings and investment products on a Production Issues (PI) project. The PI project focused on known issues within the administration, claims and product modelling systems. Hazell Carr provided an experienced team of actuaries and systems specialists to assist with the project.
Each PI was resolved in three main stages:
- Identification and Ranking
- Fixing the PI
- Remediating affected policies
Identification and Ranking
Issues were raised from a number of different sources, including a specialist in-house team proactively looking for issues, operational teams identifying issues through daily processing and the activity of various audit functions.
Once a PI had been identified, it was ranked according to the number of customers impacted, average error rates and its regulatory impact. It was also allocated to a Lead Analyst to start the investigation.
Fixing the PI
Root cause analysis was undertaken to identify all problem areas and a report generated that specified the areas in need of fixing, the testing to be carried out and the expected outcomes.
Once the fix was in place, the analyst would test and document any outcomes. If there were differences between actual and expected outcomes, they were investigated and changes made until it passed testing. The fix was then issued to the live environment.
Remediating customers
A detailed scan of relevant systems was carried out to highlight the exact population of affected policies. Supporting this, a remediation report would be generated by the Analyst and signed off by a senior technical member within the PI team. This report included a summary of the issue and the fix implemented, steps taken to identify the affected population, the remediation required, summary of testing and details of communications sent to customers.
A final report was generated, which summarised all activity and provided links to all new documentation. Once the final report was signed off the issue would be closed.