Our client was an innovative Health Insurance provider seeking to disrupt and transform their industry through reference-based pricing. Operating in a very complex marketplace, with such lofty goals, they sought Core Catalysts’ help in developing a Strategic Roadmap and twenty-four-month Operating Plan.
Armed Forces Insurance Exchange (AFI) is a personal lines carrier specializing in the military community spanning active duty, veterans, certain government agency personnel, and their immediate families. AFI needed to migrate off its legacy mainframe-based policy admin and claims system to a newer Platform supporting an updated set of products. That Migration Program was in year seven with minimal progress and extensive costs. AFI’s long-term strategy required migration of all lines of business from the legacy mainframe to the modern Platform at a supportable investment level.
A medium-sized credit union had started the process of developing and launching a new commercial division of their organization. Key to the success of the launch was the implementation of a core processing system and the related ancillary and Fintech products. The implementation and launch of this technology was a key success factor in the launch of the new Commercial division. This effort was constrained by a tight timeline as well as public scrutiny, as it was a widely announced initiative involving a high visibility communication organization as their first major Commercial banking client.
A health insurance provider had undertaken the efforts and initiatives associated with an enterprise-wide Transformation Office. As a natural progression of this undertaking, the company decided to operationalize the Transformation Office into an Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO). This entailed the augmentation of current Transformation Office resources with additional resources including Requirements Analysts, Process Engineers, and Project and Program Managers. The combination of all these resources required a common framework and methodology to which they would manage various business initiatives. The goal was to foster a more productive and effective EPMO by using common methods of operations. In addition, the company was looking to improve Business Unit (BU) and IT capabilities in the areas of project initiation and management and to ultimately drive reduced reliance on outside third-party vendors such as Optum.
The short-term need was to develop a framework and methodology for managing business initiatives with significant IT involvement. The framework needed to be flexible enough to accommodate various types of business initiatives, including:
The framework needed to be a ‘hybrid’ based on both Agile and Waterfall methodologies in order to accommodate software development, third party systems integration and, more importantly, to be easily understood by all the major stakeholders for a given initiative. Key to the successful implementation of this framework and methodology was that it needed to be developed in the context of the design of the new EPMO. This new group was tasked with identifying, qualifying, prioritizing, planning, resourcing and managing all the major business initiatives of the organization.
The framework and methodology initially needed to be rolled out to the EPMO group through a ‘train the trainer’ approach, combined with applying the new framework on current projects/initiatives in order to speed the learning and adoption process. Since this will be a new framework at the company, the Organizational Change Management (OCM) team needed to be used to help drive the change throughout the entire organization over time.
A large insurance regulator was experiencing multiple challenges within the Service Desk Area. First, fully training new resources required a significant time and resource investment, which compounded the on-boarding process. Second, a new Help Desk service offering (Life Insurance Policy Locator Service) caused a significant increase in calls/requests for service. Third, the company was operating significantly below set staffing levels.
Marlen needed to consolidate thermal manufacturing operations into their Riverside, MO headquarters. This required critical equipment relocation from Bristow, OK to Riverside. To accomplish this, efforts were focused on meeting Marlen’s timeline, budget, downtime expected during this move, and delivering overall results. The project included crafting a layout to assure optimal workflow constrained by a finite footprint.
Multi-billion dollar manufacturing company offers trade discounts to distributors to promote the sale of its products. Often, the discounts are in the form of rebate payments which are calculated by the company. The administration processes to support these programs (data gathering, payment calculation) are complex and labor intensive for the company.
This Division of a multinational manufacturer of food and beverage packaging needed to document and standardize their proposal response processes for new and existing customers. The sales processes were complex, often requiring the involvement of multiple groups at the company, including finance and accounting, product operations, product management, sales and executive leadership. The proposals were typically for multi-year, multi-million dollar deals in a very competitive environment. In addition, the company had recently established a new product manager team and the current processes were not documented, so it was difficult for the product managers to get up to speed. They had over 4000 SKU’s (stock keeping units), and data was in disparate systems that was hard to get to and use. Adding to the complexity, many of their sales team members were remote and proposals often had to be turned around in a short period of time, which resulted in errors and inefficiencies.
This financial services company was implementing a new core system, and their internal project management resources were not meeting expectations, due to lack of experience and necessary skills. A new leadership team had just been put in place and time was of the essence due to regulatory pressures for addressing certain business issues such as credit scoring. It was a complex implementation that consisted of multiple project teams, so the company was looking for external resources with the appropriate skill sets to manage the system implementation.
A multi-million dollar services company was implementing a document management system and the implementation effort was over a year behind schedule. Company personnel did not have strong project management skills and execution discipline. They were in a high growth mode and needed to build their ability to deliver new software applications and process improvements.
