A Digital Transformation Project

Optimizing Workflows: Freeing Underwriters Through Process Automation

Optimizing Workflows: Freeing Underwriters Through Process Automation

Company

Industry

Financial Services

Project Name

CI Renewal Automation

My Role

Project Lead

Timeline

3 months

The Challenge

The existing Critical Illness (CI) Renewal process involves highly repetitive steps, causing underwriters to lose time on tasks like specifications lookup, manual data entry, and repetitive calculations. This inefficiency resulted in extended turnaround times, strained internal resources, increased human errors, and a negative impact on the customer experience.

The Solution

Implemented an internal renewal pricing tool to automate key stages of the CI renewal cycle for underwriting teams.

KEY RESULTS

100%

Adoption rate

200+

Annual hours saved

98%

User satisfaction scores

Context

Sun Life is a leading global financial services organization delivering a broad range of insurance and wealth management solutions to both corporate and individual clients. With over 150 years of history, Sun Life may not be the first name associated with innovation and automation. However, through strategic digital transformation initiatives, we have proven that even long-established workflows can be reimagined to deliver exceptional efficiency, agility, and user experiences.

Within Sun Life, our team (SunAdvantage) specializes in underwriting group insurance policies for small business clients across Canada. Due to this unique nature, we routinely manage a high volume of tasks throughout the policy lifecycle, examples include requests for quote, applications, and renewals. As digital transformation continues to drive change across the financial services sector, we saw a clear opportunity to reshape our existing processes with more efficient and user-centric solutions.

My Role

To meet this critical business need, I led a cross-functional project team in adopting the lean digital transformation approach, where we focused on identifying process inefficiencies and optimizing processes through targeted digital solutions. As the Project Lead, my responsibilities include:

Identify pain points through stakeholder interviews and process mapping

Lead collaboration with cross-functional partners to drive project alignment

Define clear project requirements and success metrics

Ideate and prioritize features for the CI Renewal Pricing Tool

Develop the pricing tool using available technological resources

Promote tool adoption and ensure user satisfaction across organization

Understanding the Pain Points

Through in-depth shadowing sessions and end-to-end journey mapping, we discovered that underwriters spent significant time on highly repetitive tasks such as specifications extraction, manual data entry, and calculations. These inefficiencies led to the following key issues:

Problem

Root Cause (The Why)

Opportunity

Repetitive workflow tasks

Manual data extraction from multiple sources

Centralize data extraction workflows

Increased human error risk

Manual data input is prone to errors

Automate data aggregation, validation and input

Strained underwriting resource

High volume of repetitive, low-value tasks

Free up underwriting capacity for more value-driven tasks

Negative client experience

Delays and errors in renewal processing

Accelerate renewal processing and improve accuracy

Constraints & Tradeoffs

The long-term enterprise vision was to automate renewals through Robotic Process Automation (RPA). However, RPA access was limited within Group Underwriting, and our SunAdvantage segment was not prioritized for automation support due to resource constraints and a strategic focus on higher-volume business lines.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

As a result, we adapted our approach and built an Excel-based CI Renewal Pricing Tool using VBA macros. This decision involved several key tradeoffs:

Ideal vs. Available Technology
While RPA offered a more scalable and robust solution, we used Excel macros to achieve automation within our team's current capabilities. This allowed us to make impacts without waiting for enterprise-level support.

Speed vs. Scalability
The Excel-based solution enabled rapid implementation and immediate efficiency gains. However, it comes with limitations in scalability and maintainability compared to RPA.

Acting Now vs. Waiting
Rather than delay improvements while waiting for RPA access, we chose to act with the tools at hand. This decision allowed us to deliver real value quickly and build a case for future investment.

Crafting User-Centered Solutions

With a strong understanding of the identified pain points and organizational constraints, we focused on developing a practical, user-centered solution to address core underwriter challenges and unlock measurable efficiency gains. The tool automated data pulling from multiple sources and consolidated them into a single pricing interface. This approach eliminated manual data entry, reduced the risk of errors, and enabled underwriters to price multiple CI renewals concurrently. Our approach to automation was anchored in two core initiatives:

CI Renewal Pricing Tool

This automation eliminated manual data entry and enabled our team to price all CI renewals concurrently. improving consistency, efficiency, and accuracy across the renewal process. multiple CI renewals, ensuring consistency, efficiency, and accuracy across policy renewals.

This automation eliminated manual data entry and enabled our team to price all CI renewals concurrently, significantly improved consistency, efficiency, and accuracy across the entire CI renewal process.

Streamlined Workflow

We also redesigned the CI renewal workflow to streamline task ownership and eliminate redundant handoffs. By centralizing task ownership with a single underwriter, we empowered individual underwriters to manage the entire CI renewal lifecycle from end-to-end.

This shift helped our team to improved process visibility, accountability, and ultimately enabling us to deliver faster service and a higher-quality experience for our policyholders.

Implementation

The implementation of the CI Renewal Pricing Tool led to a remarkable 100x improvement in average processing speed, freeing up over 200 underwriting hours annually. This increased efficiency allowed the team to significantly reduce CI renewal turnaround times, improve customer satisfaction, and reallocate underwriter capacity to more complex cases and strategic initiatives.

Category

Before

After

Data

Manual extraction and input from multiple sources

Integrated, automated data consolidation

Errors

Frequent human errors due to manual entry

Significantly reduced human errors

Workflow

Work split between multiple underwriters

One underwriter manages end-to-end

Time

~17 hours per month

~10 minutes per month

Results

Building on a deep understanding of the pain points and opportunities identified, our next step was to design user-centered solutions that directly addressed underwriter challenges while driving measurable efficiency gains. Our approach centered on strategically automating key CI renewal tasks through two core improvements:

200+ Hours Reclaimed Annually
Time savings enabled underwriters to focus more on high-value analysis, client interactions, and risk assessments.

100% Adoption Rate
Seamless integration and intuitive workflows led to full adoption across Small Group underwriting teams in Canada, validating the tool’s usability and business value.

100x Faster Processing Time
Automated data aggregation and pricing workflows drastically reduced average processing time, and accelerated the end-to-end CI renewal process.

98% User Satisfaction Score
The intuitive, user-centered Renewal Pricing Tool led to widespread adoption and positive feedback across underwriting teams across Canada.

Streamlined Workflow
By redesigning the CI renewal workflow, we established a new operation model where one single assigned underwriter manages all CI renewals each month. This clear ownership has enhanced accountability, simplified workflow management, ultimately leading to faster, more accurate and consistent service delivery.

Improved Customer Experience
Faster renewals and fewer errors strengthened client trust and enhanced the overall service experience.

Reflection

This project reinforced the importance of deeply understanding the why behind user pain points before jumping into solutions. By carefully analyzing underwriting workflows through work shadowing and journey mapping, we were able to design a tool that improved both internal efficiency and overall client experience.

What Went Well
Prioritizing a deep understanding of user pain points was crucial. This approach ensured that the solutions developed were highly aligned with the user's real needs, leading to strong adoption and high user satisfaction rate.

What Could Be Improved
If I were to extend the project, I would implement a structured system for ongoing monitoring of the tool’s performance and regular user feedback collection. Continuous measurement would allow for iterative improvements and ensure that the solution remains effective over time.

© Aimee Jin. 2025

© Aimee Jin. 2025