When the Process Is a Person: What a Claims Floor Taught Me About Tribal Knowledge

By Andreas Moekesch

Years before Vevos existed, I sold a claims automation deal to a company that processed claims for larger insurance carriers. Claims were not a department there. Claims were the entire business. During discovery I went onsite to watch the work move through the building, and I opened with the most routine question in enterprise software: could I see the process documentation?

The owner did not reach for a binder. He pointed across the floor at a woman on the phone and said, "That would be Rita" (not her real name, though everything else happened exactly this way).

Rita knew which claims needed a second pair of eyes before anything got paid. Rita knew which adjusters returned calls and which ones needed three reminders. Rita could tell a complicated claim from a claim that was trouble long before any system could. There was a written procedure somewhere. It had not been updated in years, and nobody could tell me where it lived without first asking Rita.

I wish I could tell you this company was unusual. In twenty years as a sales engineer, walking into enterprises across insurance, banking, manufacturing, and higher education, I met a Rita in every single one of them.

Most companies do not have processes. They have people, and they call them processes.

Why the documentation never gets written.

It is tempting to blame Rita. Rita is the least guilty person in the building.

Look at the economics from her side. She is the busiest expert on the floor. Writing down what she knows would take weeks of the time she does not have, and the document would begin to rot the day she finished it, because processes change and PDFs do not. Meanwhile, the questions keep coming, the claims keep arriving, and answering from memory takes her thirty seconds. Every incentive points in the same direction: keep working, keep answering, and keep the knowledge where it is most useful, in her head.

The company carries the risk instead. Engineers have a name for it: the bus factor, the number of people who would have to disappear before an operation stops. In most operations departments, the honest answer is one. And the bill arrives on a schedule nobody controls. Rita resigns, retires, or finally takes the three-week vacation she has earned twice over, and the workflow does not degrade gracefully. It stops, and the organization discovers the difference between having a process and having a person.

The traditional fix was to bring in consultants. They would interview Rita, run workshops, and six weeks later deliver a handsome binder and a fee with a comma in it. The binder aged exactly like the PDF before it. The uncomfortable math never changed: documenting expertise cost more than the risk appeared to be worth, right up until the day it was not.

Capture the conversation, not the document.

What has changed is that the interview no longer needs the consultant, and the documentation no longer needs the writing.

This is precisely the moment we built Vevos AI for. You can record the conversation with your Rita directly in the browser, and the AI turns the discussion into a professional, standards-compliant BPMN 2.0 process map. You can upload the recording of a meeting that already happened. You can feed it the old standard operating procedure or a photo of the whiteboard after the workshop. Whatever shape the knowledge arrives in, the output is the same: a living process map that can be reviewed, versioned, and kept current, and that automation agents can eventually run.

The new cost of turning tribal knowledge into a company asset is about an hour of Rita's time. She talks about her work, which experts are almost always happy to do, and the documentation happens as a byproduct of the conversation. Nobody stops processing claims to become a technical writer.

The "Rita Test".

Here is a test you can run this week. Ask a department head to show you the documentation for their most important process, and watch where their eyes go. If they reach for a binder, check the date on it. If they point across the floor, you have just located your operational risk, and it has a first name.

The companies that handle this well are not the ones with the most disciplined writers. They are the ones that made capturing knowledge cheaper than losing it. For most of enterprise history, that trade was impossible. It is not anymore.

Rita, wherever you are, the coffee is on me.