The COO at a Top 3 U.S. health insurance provider sought to improve production throughout her organization. Using her Wall Street background, she identified seven categories of waste she sought to reduce or eliminate. These included: “Defects” (i.e., improper submissions), excess processing (rework), unnecessary wait-times, avoidable motion, and others.
Key to eliminating the specific problems was pinpointing them. With the COO of Membership Administration as its sponsor, this health insurance provider reached out to The Lab, North America’s respected authority for end-to-end (E2E) process mapping and automation discovery for knowledge-work activities.
The project scope was broad. It encompassed corporate, institutional, and individual plans, including Medicare and Medicaid. Specifically, the COO wanted to identify and convert all one-off methods into standardized work modules. Only then could proper work sharing begin—along with capacity planning that wouldn’t suffer from volatility spikes, an essential consideration in today’s labor-tight market.
And so, in order to pinpoint the bottlenecks, opportunities for robotic process automation (RPA) bots, and “the seven wastes,” the first order of business for The Lab was E2E process mapping of all activities within membership-administration operations and its 1,300 employees. With minimal time commitments required of sponsors, staffers, and subject matter experts (SMEs), The Lab was able to complete the entire E2E process mapping in just seven weeks.
With the process maps in hand, The Lab was able to identify—and ultimately implement—300 improvements. While RPA (“bots” that sit at the computer handling repetitive, error-prone chores) is a minimally-invasive technology which leaves core systems intact, many of the benefit opportunities identified by The Lab for the membership-administration operation required no new technology whatsoever. Examples include:
Far too many of the membership-administration teams’ chores were spent doing mindless, repetitive, and error-prone activities, such as copying data (field-by-field) from one system to another (since the systems don’t talk to each other), and performing tedious reconciliations of data—that is, the dreaded “stare and compare” activities to make sure that data from disparate systems line up and match.
These chores, and countless others like them, are ripe opportunities for robotic process automation or RPA. An RPA “bot” can “sit at a computer,” just like a person, and perform these same activities at lightning speed, without ever slowing down, taking breaks, or making mistakes.
Contrary to some misinformation out there, knowledge workers aren’t threatened by bots like these. Given the tight market for talent, these people want to focus their skills on high-value activities… and hand off the chores to the bots. Thus automation—as identified at the activity-level in maps from The Lab—aids in employee retention, too.
The initial E2E process mapping and automation discovery was conducted by The Lab in just seven weeks. Our offices are in Houston, and we work remotely, with nothing outsourced or offshored, ever.
Given all of the benefits identified in the analysis-and-mapping phase, this U.S. Top 3 insurer retained The Lab for the implementation of its findings, which was completed in just six months. The results of this implementation are impressive; they include:
The self-funding project broke even in just four months. Twelve-month ROI was fivefold.
The best way to appreciate this speed and game-changing power is to see it for yourself. We invite you to schedule your free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab. You’ll see real RPA banking bots in action, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts.
Simply contact The Lab today at (201) 526-1200 or email us at info@thelabconsulting.com to book your free screen-share bot demo.
