For organizations with multiple locations spread across a region, a country, or the globe, the annual collection of values and exposure data can span weeks, even months. Those guiding the process are often all-too-familiar with the challenges of consolidating and reporting on this data.
In addition to competing for the attention of individuals across the organization who must balance their day-to-day job duties with the responsibility of values and exposure data collection tasks, this process comes with the challenge of employee turnover and differing functional or departmental priorities. Organizational fluidity resulting from M&A activity, property transactions, and seasonal leasing of facilities and vehicles often must also be factored in. Further complicating the endeavor is the increased administrative burden on risk professionals who have to send multiple follow-up emails to obtain status updates or request additional information.
Shazia Ojla, Head of Insurable Risk at Rentokil Initial, and her team faced similar difficulties, as well as challenges specific to Rentokil Initial and the markets in which its multiple businesses operate. Added to the mix was the fact that the legacy risk management information system (RMIS) the team had long used to facilitate the collection of values and exposure data and provide renewal data to insurers was becoming increasingly unable to keep pace with requirements.
THE CHALLENGES OF COLLECTING VALUES & EXPOSURE DATA ACROSS A GLOBAL ENTERPRISE
Rentokil Initial provides a broad range of services that protect people from the dangers of pest-borne disease and the risks of poor hygiene. Since its founding in 1925, Rentokil has grown to become the world’s leading provider of commercial pest control. Initial, the world’s leading provider of commercial hygiene services, was founded in 1903 and acquired by Rentokil in 1996. Two other global brands—Ambius and Steritech—and numerous local brands (including Western Exterminator Company in the United States) make up the entirety of the company, which employs nearly 40,000 people in 75 countries. In 2018, Rentokil Initial posted ongoing revenue of £2,493m—approximately $3.14B (USD).
The organization uses a mix of retention and transfer to insure against the risks faced by its broad range of businesses. Part of this process is the annual collection of values and exposure data, such as square footage, TIV, and COPE, to name just a few, for use in renewals with insurers and to inform decisions related to self-insured risk. According to Ms. Ojla, the organization’s size, global reach, and M&A-centered approach to growth add to the complexity of collecting data across the enterprise.
Other challenges include:
- The number of businesses brought into the company through M&A activity makes it difficult to maintain a single, up-to-date list of properties.
- Differing operating structures and hierarchies among businesses mean it can be difficult to know who is responsible for providing the required information.
- Turnover among roles tasked with collecting exposure data can result in the need for training and time-consuming instruction if the process is too complicated.
Rather than simplifying the process, the aging, legacy RMIS used to collect exposure data often exacerbated these and other challenges. For example, the Insurance Act of 2015 increased the onus on insureds to provide information that more fully disclosed and accurately represented risk. In attempting to extract this additional information, limitations in the legacy system’s reporting capabilities became even more obvious. “Our growth and the fact that our businesses were becoming more complex revealed that our prior system couldn’t keep up,” Ms. Ojla said. “It required a significant investment in order for us to do all of the things we wanted to. If we were going to continue to invest more in this area, we knew we should seek the right provider.”
USING ORIGAMI RISK TO ADDRESS CHALLENGES IN VALUES & EXPOSURE COLLECTION
To address the challenges referenced above, Ms. Ojla selected Origami Risk. Influencing the decision was the system’s agility and overall usability, which became clear during system demonstrations. The first phase in the implementation of Origami Risk was focused on values and exposure data collection.
To begin, the Rentokil Initial team worked with their Origami Risk service team to bring over historical data from the previous RMIS to the new system and set up collection forms and workflows. Upon completion, the teams immediately got to work with the first round of data collection. The teams then began to work from lessons learned during the collection period to fine-tune the new process. “Moving to a new system encourages new conversations,” Ms. Ojla said. “And it prompts users to ask a lot of good questions.”
In response to these questions, and taking feedback from users, the teams made improvements to forms and the questions they contained. They also developed training materials and took advantage of the ability to add on-screen tips with step-by-step instructions to assist users. To solve for the challenge of getting exposure collection forms to persons directly responsible for entering that data, users were given the option to quickly and easily reassign a form with the click of a button. And to accommodate busy schedules, the teams gave users the ability to save an in-progress collection form and return to it later. Also refined were the in-built validations that alert users when a form is submitted and when there is missing data or variances between the previous and current years’ values that require attention.
As the second collection period in which Origami Risk was used to gather exposure data drew to a close, Ms. Ojla commented on the improvements she and her team have seen when compared to their previous RMIS.
According to Ms. Ojla, this leaves more time for her and her team to look closely at the consolidated reports. “Rather than being embroiled in the collection process, we’re able to spend more time thinking about the data and what we will present to our insurers,” she said. “We have better quality data and more revealing reports with clear conclusions.”
USING RISK MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY TO ACHIEVE LONG-TERM OBJECTIVES
Ms. Ojla and her team approached the first phase of the RMIS migration process with the goal of obtaining a system capable of meeting the organization’s exposure data collection requirements. Equally important in the selection process was the fact that Origami Risk offered a single solution, rather than two or three separate systems, that could be used to accomplish additional objectives.
To achieve these other objectives, the second phase of building out the system is already underway. In this phase, the focus is on converting and loading the organization’s historical claims information into Origami Risk, as well as setting up data feeds from Rentokil Initial’s TPA and carrier partners. Dashboards and reports that give the team the ability to more easily generate reports on the organization’s loss history and exposures will also be set up as part of this phase.
According to Ms. Ojla, this is still only the beginning. After referring to future plans for loading Rentokil Initial’s policy program data into Origami Risk and integrating the RMIS with the organization’s property management system, she spoke to her long-term intentions: “The goal is to provide the Rentokil Initial executive team with a better line of sight into our exposures, our loss data, and our programs. And then, to start to expand it from there; to begin modeling so that we can proactively look at the risks to which we’re likely to be exposed.” With Origami Risk as a partner, those future plans are more than a possibility.
