How Zurich Insurance balances growing Power Platform development with strong governance

When Zurich adopted Microsoft 365 Enterprise service in 2019, its employees gained access to a powerful product suite, Microsoft Power Platform, that would empower them to take digital transformation into their own hands. The no-code/low-code platform—Power Apps and Power Automate in particular—gave regular business users the ability to create their own applications and automations to streamline processes, reduce costs, and drive innovation. 

To better manage a rapidly growing environment of apps and flows, Zurich established a Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) around Power Platform. With a CoE, Zurich was able to better secure the platform in its tenant; regulate the use of data, connectors, and environments; and ensure solutions and their makers comply with company security, IT, and DLP policies. The CoE also supports makers with training and best practices. To underscore this balance of governance and maker support, Zurich calls its CoE the Power Platform Center for Enablement (C4E). 

An operational model built for scale

Given the size of the global tenant, Zurich developed a decentralized operational model. This was a critical driver for growth. Not only were there simply too many makers and projects for one team to support directly, but these makers work in multiple languages with a variety of security and privacy regulations, both at the local and national level. 

To accommodate this diversity, the central C4E team owns the central governance model and provisions environments, while local C4E teams focus on production and local governance requirements. “We no longer create environments for individual makers. Instead, we only create environments for our existing local C4E teams. These teams manage their own environments and users within the boundaries imposed by our global C4E team” explains C4E Solution Architect Valentin Mazhar.

Today, there are almost 20 different teams organized by business unit or country and functional business groups (such as finance). The model has proven ideal for both scale and control. “We built a decentralized governance model while maintaining central guidelines and oversight,” says Mirco Calbucci, Head of Collaboration Services, Zurich Insurance Group. “Our team struck the right balance between governance and empowerment. This resulted in simplification and innovation for our business and internal customers.” 

Refining the governance model 

To support their new C4E, Zurich installed the Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit in Zurich’s global tenant. The kit offers a collection of tools, components, and strategies to help organizations drive adoption and support of Power Platform.  “The COE Starter Kit delivers big benefits from Day 1 including telemetry that drives our entire governance strategy,” says Mazhar. 

This telemetry is generated using the inventory components in the kit and gives Zurich deep visibility of all the Power Apps and Power Automate solutions in the tenant—including their connectors, components, makers, and environments. In keeping with their tightly integrated operational model, the central team provides each local team with localized access to global usage and governance dashboards. This allows each local team to monitor data related to their environments and their local usage in the default environment.

To prevent over usage of the default environment, over which local teams do not have administrator privileges, the global C4E team developed and deployed a Certification system. This system automatically browses through the Apps and Flows of the default environment and identifies the ones requiring certification against a set of criteria. If an App or Flow is identified as such, the respective owner is automatically contacted to fill out some certification information. Each local C4E team has access to the certified data related to their scope to help prioritize the solutions which should be migrated to their dedicated environments.

Fast forward to 2024 - and an even more complex development landscape. Today, there are over 4,500 makers across Zurich who work with over 70 DLP policies and related connectors. To drive efficiency, the team has developed even more tools for governance. One tool not only makes it easier to enable and block connectors but to do mass updates across all environments if a DLP policy changes. The solution was built on Power Platform and uses the Power Platform Admin connectors. 

Another tool helps manage Power Platform licensing. Zurich uses group-based licensing in Microsoft Entra ID. The licenses are applied to security groups. A series of Power Automate flows check daily to see if people were added or removed from the groups and logs this data in Dataverse. This enables the team to keep a running tab of which licenses are used throughout the year.

Driving productivity and adoption

The guardrails around Power Platform and company data are holding strong—the platform is both safe and secure. Zurich reports there have been no incidents associated with the company’s use of Power Platform.

At the same time, the C4E team has also been successful in fulfilling the other aspect of its mission: adoption and enablement. Much of this can be attributed to C4E’s outreach and engagement efforts—to current makers and prospective ones alike. This means keeping the C4E stocked with fresh, relevant content, being active on the Power Platform Teams and internal community channels, even providing direct support to makers and project teams.  

With engagement comes increased usage and adoption. The many thousand Power Platform solutions that have been created to date entered production after Zurich’s C4E came online. Adoption is also trending higher. “Over 25,000 employees per month around the globe are using our Power Apps applications with 200,000 successful flow runs every day,” says Calbucci.

Delivering real business impact

The true measure of the C4E’s impact rests in the innovative solutions it has enabled Zurich’s makers to deliver on Power Platform. 

In one example, Power Platform was used to automate a complex account administration and approval process. What used to take weeks can be completed in just a few days. Power Automate flows drive over 20 stages in the process across multiple internal and external systems, including SAP. The system has been customized for use by over 20 countries in the Zurich network. Originally developed with the help of Avanade, it is now largely managed in-house - in part, thanks to the ease of working with the low-code components. 

The benefits of the app are significant. “IMAPPs hyper automation has yielded productivity gains of over 400 days annually and provided full, end to end process transparency, collaboration, audit compliance, insight into the value chain, and more,” says Achim Fisher, Service Manager, IAA Intelligent Process Automation, Zurich Insurance Group. 

Another app - built by a Senior Claims Handler in the UK - leverages tight integration of the Power Platform with Microsoft 365 to bring consistency and efficiency in the claims note taking process. The app saved the Claims Processing team an estimated 1200 hours per year and improved data consistency and data quality.

To AI and beyond

As Zurich looks to the future, the company is also expanding its use of other Power Platform technologies such as Copilot in Power Apps - as well as AI-driven capabilities. On the AI front, Zurich had already been working with Azure Machine Learning on several AI projects. Now, it’s using Power Platform. 

In the central office, data from invoices for energy consumption and waste management is automatically extracted using AI-driven flows built with AI Builder in Power Automate. The data is used to better understand the company’s carbon footprint. Based on the success of the app, it’s now being assessed for a wider rollout across the Zurich network. A similar app is being developed in the North America region to extract data in financial statements. 

Zurich also has plans to use Microsoft Copilot Studio to build their own copilots—a new generation of intelligent conversational experience that goes beyond traditional chatbots. “We are confident that the recent improvements announced regarding Copilot Studio governance capabilities will allow us to leverage the Copilot Studio Generative AI features in compliance with our internal policies,” says Mazhar. This includes new actions in Copilot Studio DLP Policies which provide controls over Generative Answers at the environment level. 

Meanwhile, work on the C4E continues. Yet another new tool deployed by the C4E team helps makers to report both estimated and real metrics for their Power Platform projects, from efficiencies gained to risks reduced. The app calculates a score and posts it to a dashboard, which also enables the team to quickly identify the most successful solutions – and spark ideas on how they could be leveraged elsewhere in the company. 

Given the pace of innovation at Zurich, it likely won’t be long before that dashboard lights up with a whole host of interesting metrics. As Mazhar says, “With the Power Platform and its vast range of functionalities, our people are continuously delivering impactful innovation to our customers and modernizing our operations.”