The existing implementation process for an Administrative Services organization was segmented between several functional areas (account management, contracts, plan), which resulted in rework, timing delays and communication/accountability issues, as well as extremely long cycle times.
Account managers in the Administrative Services organization were expected to act as implementation generalists, but most actually performed only a few implementations a year, so they lacked the necessary system & process expertise.
A Customer Service organization that had largely operated status quo for a considerable number of years wanted to achieve greater economies of scale, improved customer service and greater ROI on ongoing IT investments. Heavy dependence on legacy systems added further constraints.
A Support Services organization needed to identify opportunities to reduce operational costs and increase the utilization of an off-shore back-office processing unit to improve both process efficiency and customer experience.
A SBU that had experienced a breakdown in operational controls for a certain type of transaction processing, resulting in a material financial impact and a qualified SAS70 audit report. PPI was asked to identify, assess, and strengthen operating and financial controls.
An SBU needed to embed preventive controls within at-risk financial transaction processes through development of a Business Rules Engine (BRE) that would remain responsive to changing business needs while avoiding the need for expensive, wide-scale overhaul of embedded IT systems.
A Sales organization handled a broad variety of insurance and financial products through many separate sales channels, using both its own sales force and external agents and brokers. The goal was to migrate all sales compensation processes to a pre-selected common IT platform that needed to accommodate the variations of processes and practices required.
An Administration organization needed to consolidate on a common platform the core administrative functions of a large number of group insurance products that had historically been performed in distinct product and market-segment silos that used many different administrative systems and processes.
Development of Business Requirements to support consolidation of processes on a common IT platform required detailed analysis to determine where real similarities existed across multiple products and channels, and where superficial likenesses disguised real differences that would need to be accommodated.
In the context of a multi-product administrative platform consolidation, emergence of a major sales opportunity with an aggressive timeframe required additional analysis and planning for an intermediate development phase to enable implementation in an improved version of the current-state platform prior to completion of the design and development of the full future state.
A Benefit Services organization needed to develop consistent metrics across all products, regions, and workgroups to enable a comprehensive perspective on how the customer is being serviced based on accurate and readily accessed data.
An organization experienced seasonal variability in back office business processes based on customer cycles, which had historically been managed either by staffing to peak capacity needs or by costly and inefficient use of temporary staff, and needed to develop a more effective way to smooth out workload peaks and valleys that occur during the year.
An SBU needed to reengineer processes and organization to improve alignment with business needed, rather than geographic and systems structures, and to enhance its utilization of staff skillsets and its ability to manage complexity stemming from rapid business growth, IT investments and new product launches.
Death processing, in an insurance organization, was segmented between several functional areas (claims, call center, billing) and depended heavily on manual communication and manual tasks, which resulted in lack of coordination in data updating, communication/accountability issues, and incorrect billing and payment processing.
A third-party administrator performed many processing tasks for individual customers of an SBU, but information flow, task management, and reconciliations between the TPA and the SBU organization were inconsistent, poorly controlled, and subject to errors and gaps impacting both customer service and finance.
Business growth, evolving customer demands and the customized nature of the business had outpaced resource allocations to the SBU and their ability to invest adequately in IT. These constraints limited their ability to create proper operating leverage and economies of scale.
An SBU with a lengthy history as a small entrepreneurial unit had a relatively flat organizational structure and little segmentation of responsibilities within teams, which no longer fit their customer model and size and was not a sustainable business model for anticipated growth.
A group responsible for a specialized portfolio of products for high-net-worth customers, faced severe constraints on its ability to support projected growth. Organizational prioritizations, an aging IT infrastructure, limited data-flow, and heavy dependence on manual workarounds needed to be corrected.
A large insurance company that offered defined pension products providing plan sponsors with integrated plan investment funding and pension annuity services needed to rationalize and streamline a product mix and surrounding processes.
A leading provider of Long Term Care Insurance that outsourced their premium billing/collection, benefits payments, commission, and cash transaction processes to a major Insurance Third Party Provider (TPA) experienced several adverse financial "surprises" relative to the accounting for these activities.
A leader in the structured settlements underwriting business had to adapt to changing regulatory and statutory requirements that dramatically impacted administration of the installed base of structure settlements and introduced substantial complexity to the record keeping needed to execute payments and track liability and payees.
A major insurance carrier with a large growth opportunity in its group voluntary products needed to enhance the effectiveness of key enrollment processes and the associated customer experience to support projected sales targets.
An SBU's key process was fragmented among many functional groups, with no singular "process owners" and a lack of effective coordination, communication, & execution of roles and responsibilities across overall process.
A large insurance company lacked common and broadly understood language, terms and definition for a major category of services they offered to the marketplace. Externally, this impeded effective marketing and selling of the services and, internally, made management, tracking and reporting extremely difficult.
A major provider of B2B services firm utilized 18 customer-service centers to support its US operations, each of which performed the same set of 1800+ standard tasks in a different way, charging customers different fees and using different scripts, procedures, and system interactions to deliver equivalent services.
Staff capacity at an SBU was strained by highly siloed operations, multiple hand-offs and lengthy cycle times, and extreme variability of process based on individual account manager preference, as well as the highly reactive nature of client offerings, leading to severe process inefficiencies and a highly inconsistent customer experience.
An SBU had evolved an overly-cautious compliance process that it applied even to materials that did not actually require it, creating a process bottleneck that led to extensive delays, excessive cycle times, and a significant burden of unnecessary rework and duplication of effort.
New case implementation for a high-volume SBU was performed as a multi-handoff linear process that required each step to be completed before the next could be initiated, resulting in extreme processing delays (91% of cases not actually installed till after their effective date).
Many processes and activities in an Administrative Services organization had been customized to the requirements of specific customers. Much process variability and data inconsistency resulted from long-standing policy of allowing customers maximum flexibility in determining how and when they interact with the organization and reluctance to require customers to comply.
A major global pharmaceutical organization, embarking on a multi-year, multimillion-dollar implementation of a major IT system involving users and facilities in nine different countries, needed to determine key functional and business requirements to support essential activities and data handling by users in all locations.
A large medical equipment manufacturer needed to document core finance processes and controls to identify existing controls, determine areas of possible improvement for prioritization and action, and support SOX audits.
A global pharmaceutical organization was committed to implementing a single new HR system worldwide, rather than continuing to support the large and aging base of regional/national legacy applications currently used. To achieve this they needed to document the business processes the new system needed to support, capture and compare variations in current practice across locations, and determine which differences were required by the different regulatory and cultural regimes, and which might be standardized across locations.
