Growing Pains: How to Tell if Your Claims Process Can Scale With Your Business

Rapid growth is an exciting time for any company, but it puts immense pressure on internal processes. The manual, homegrown systems that worked for a small team can quickly become a barrier to growth for a scaling enterprise. A process that can't scale doesn't just create inefficiency; it creates significant operational risk.

How can you tell if your claims process is ready for your company's ambitions? Here are key indicators that you may be facing a scalability problem.

1. Your Team is Already "Stressed Out" If your current claims team is already feeling the pressure, it's a clear sign the process is at capacity. At a dealership group that had grown to 60 locations, their lean, two-person claims team was managing 400 annual claims. This volume and complexity caused the claims manager to be "really stressed out" , and the recent retirement of another employee further constrained their resources. A process that relies on heroic efforts from individuals is not scalable.

2. Your Projections Make Your Manual Process Seem "Impossible" Look at your hiring plan for the next 3 years. Will your current process support that growth? A new vehicle manufacturer planning to grow from 900 to 11,000 employees and open 80 retail locations knew that their current manual spreadsheet tracking was becoming "impossible" as volume increased. A scalable process must be able to handle future volume, not just today's.

3. You Have Multiple, Fragmented Reporting Systems As companies grow, different departments often adopt their own systems. One company found themselves with one system for security incidents (Ontic) and another for EHS (Benchmark). This creates fragmented data and prevents a unified view of risk. A scalable process requires a centralized system that can consolidate data from across the business.

4. You Can't Get the Granular Data You Need As you grow, the need for more sophisticated data becomes critical. The manufacturing company needed to track injuries by job description/title for injury prevention. A manual process running on spreadsheets makes this level of granular, data-driven analysis incredibly difficult.

If these signs are familiar, it’s a strong indication that your current claims process may be a barrier to your company's growth. Implementing a modern, configurable RMIS provides the scalable foundation needed to protect your business as it expands.