Grad School Essay: Manzana Insurance

The Manzana Insurance has undergone a storied growth since its inception in 1902. Originally an insurer for California’s orchard and farm industry, Manzana Insurance soon expanded into additional insurance segments following the Earthquake of 1906 and by the early 1950s was the second-largest home and commercial property insurer in the state. However, the high interest rates of the 1970s and competition from a new upstart Golden Gate Casualty largely eroded this competitive edge by 1988 Manzana and Golden Gate were tied as California’s largest property insurers. The start of the new decade will bring new challenges to Manzana and necessary overhauls to recapture its lead within the industry and stave off the advances of its main competitor.

The Green Team, LLC is an independent firm contracted by the holding company of Manzana, Banque de Soleil Manzana, to review the current internal processing methods, find any inherent shortfalls with these techniques and finally offer recommendations for process improvements. In particular the Green Team, LLC will be reviewing the operations at the Fruitvale Branch, which has consistently received the lowest rankings in terms of performance metrics. The main issue facing this branch are inefficiencies causing poor turnaround time for issuing policies and the loss of half of their renewals every year. These issues are causing much discontent among the 76 strong sales force of independent agents and the three underwriting teams serving them. Given this strong state of internal discontent, the importance of this review cannot be overstated. Golden Gate’s policy of a one-day turnaround time for their agents is one of the many areas where they are out performing Fruitvale, and if this continues threatens to cause an exodus of the highest performing agents to the competition.

Upon a thorough analysis of the Fruitvale Branch, the Green Team, LLC has identified several shortfalls in the workflow processes and offers four recommendations that if implemented, will bring the branch to its desired state of operation. Our first recommendation is to change the manner in which work flows between the respective teams, in order to create a more even workflow distribution. Our second recommendation builds on the first, and recommends Fruitvale undergo a process improvement to overcome the backlogs and bottlenecks currently plaguing their workflow process. Our third recommendation is to replace the RAIN process in favor of a FIFO policy and to focus on RERUNs. Finally, consolidating the underwriting teams will lead to an efficient workflow and hence, eliminate bottlenecks.

Ultimately, it is necessary for Manzana to understand the severity of the issues facing its Fruitvale Branch and to overhaul these defunct processes. Given the fact that these shortcomings are well documented this should be an easy process. Failure to do so would not only cause a loss