Santam is the leading insurer in South Africa.
We've got operations
throughout Africa and East Asia.
We do personalised and commercialised
insurance as well as specialist business insurance
like liability and marine
heavy haulage, covers like that.
So as a risk surveyor at Santam,
we go around to different businesses
insured with us, and analyse
and assess their risks.
We make sure that they fully comply
with fire safety, security measures.
We check the condition
of their structures,
just making sure that from
a risk management perspective,
everything is in order.
It is expected of a surveyor
to do a number of risk sites per day,
maybe three or in some some cases four,
and the quicker he can get through that,
the more he can do
the higher coverage we can get.
But if he really goes
through that fast and misses
some of the risks and produces
an incorrect risk profile for that policy,
then that may result in a loss
later down the line.
So if the survey is not properly completed
or if it goes wrong,
we could miss very critical information.
In 2014, they adopted their
first technology into this environment
to make the process smoother,
and it worked very well.
It was a bespoke solution,
but it was expensive to change
and it was difficult
to keep the system in line
with the changing business environment.
So even before we started
the development of the software,
we did the proof of concept
with Field Service.
We spent time
envisioning what the art of the possible
would be, building out
what an ideal system
would look like for them
if they had to adopt certain
of our technologies.
For us,
the system needs to be user friendly.
It needs to support our productivity
and time management.
There is a balance between
the speed of execution and the accuracy.
And it was ascertained
that Dynamics Field Service
be fit as a solution
for their risk assessors.
We engaged with change managers,
we engaged with the users.
We set up the e-learning material
and give them
as much as possible of the solution
very early in the process.
The technology has enabled their people
to be a lot more efficient
and effective in their day to day jobs,
and they are able to do a lot more
with our technology in place.
In the previous system,
they were limited with
the number of photos
they can take on a specific site.
It was limited to ten, I think
ten or 15 photos, and now it's unlimited.
I like the way that we can schedule
our appointments.
You can keep track of everywhere
that you need to go.
It even tells you
the distance you need
if you've got two or more appointments
on the same day.
It provides the survey administrators a
mechanism to schedule the surveys
for the risk surveyors.
It integrates with their calendars
and it integrates with maps
so that they can take into account
the the traveling time
between between the risk sites.
They've also adopted Dynamics
Customer Insights,
and they will then further progress
their suite of business applications
to sales, customer service and marketing.
So in Santam, customer
centricity is very important
and we constantly look at streamlining
the customer experience.
So Field Service has enabled the surveyor
to complete the survey quickly.
Surveying at a customer
site is relatively invasive
and they want to have us
off site as quickly as possible,
and with Field Service,
the surveyor can achieve that.
What's nice about the solution
is that it has an offline capability as well,
so your field workers can then populate,
or do the work that they need to do,
and then it updates
automatically later to the system.
It's given them the ability
to store all that information
in a secure way and therefore
they're able to achieve more.
The relationship with Microsoft
is very healthy.
They assist wherever they can.
They are very supportive
throughout this development process and
and afterwards, even with the software
in production, they keep close and
and they make sure that we are successful
with the implementation.