What it actually takes to run catastrophe claims, ALE, and vendor operations when events hit. No theory. Just the workflows, metrics, and decisions that determine outcomes.
This is part of our 5-part series, Atlis Field Manual.
Ask any adjuster to describe a heavy CAT week, and you’ll hear something like this:
- “I spent most of yesterday on the phone with vendors.”
- “I was comparing rates across three portals with eight tabs open.”
- “I had to chase down two invoices and fix a mistake before finance could pay them.”
Very little of that description has to do with adjudication. It’s logistics.
When
30–40% of adjuster time is consumed by logistics; the cost isn’t limited to frustration. It’s a direct hit to productivity, quality, and employee retention.
The real cost of adjuster time
Adjusters are among the more expensive and specialized resources in a claims organization. Their core responsibilities are:
- Evaluating coverage and causation
- Making fair, defensible decisions
- Communicating with policyholders in difficult moments
- Managing complex files where judgment actually matters
Every hour spent chasing down accommodation options or clarifying vendor invoices is an hour not spent on those functions.
Multiply that by hundreds of adjusters over the course of a CAT season and you end up with something that looks very much like a hidden FTE tax.
Where time actually goes in ALE and contents
In practice, adjusters lose time to:
- Searching multiple vendor portals for availability
- Manually comparing hotel, short-term rental, and corporate housing options
- Coordinating move dates, storage, and follow-up visits
- Tracking approvals and extensions in personal or shared spreadsheets
- Handling billing discrepancies one email at a time
None of these steps is inherently wasteful. They’re simply not a good use of adjuster time.
The FTE tax during CAT events
During a major event, the impact becomes more visible.
Consider a simplified scenario:
- 150 adjusters are engaged on CAT work
- On average, 35% of their time is pulled into logistics tasks
That’s equivalent to more than 50 adjusters working full-time on coordination rather than resolution.
If you wrote an org chart from scratch, you wouldn’t intentionally create that structure. Yet, without redesigned workflows, that is effectively how many carriers operate during a surge.
Reframing adjuster time as a design constraint
A better approach is to treat adjuster time as a design constraint, not as a flexible resource that can absorb anything the system throws at it.
If you accept that adjusters should primarily work on:
- Decision-making
- Negotiation and communication
- Edge cases and complex scenarios
Then workflows need to be built so that:
- Routine logistics can proceed without continuous human intervention
- Standard cases follow well-defined paths
- Exceptions are surfaced with complete context, not raw tasks
That requires deliberate orchestration—across systems, vendors, and internal teams.
Where we’re focusing
In conversations with claims leaders and adjusters, the same theme keeps coming up: there is no shortage of individual effort. The problem is how that effort is allocated.
We’re building Atlis to take on the parts of ALE and vendor logistics that don’t require judgment: capturing requests, matching them to vendors under predefined rules, coordinating bookings and extensions, and consolidating the resulting billing.
The intent is straightforward: give adjusters back the time they need to do the work only they can do. Different carriers will draw that line in different places, but the underlying question is universal—how much of your most expensive talent’s time is being spent on work that could be designed out of their day?
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“Why Manual Coordination Fails During CAT Events”
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