Employee benefits insurance provider gains “visibility at scale” through Skan

All too often, we see organizations supplementing their impressive growth rates with acquisitions to drive growth even further. However, acquisition-driven growth often leads to internal siloes and inefficient processes, and eventually, they need addressing. That was the case for a global group employee benefits insurance provider, which turned to process-intelligence vendor Skan to help transform its claims operations.

We connected with the employee benefits insurance provider’s Vice President of Digital Strategy, to identify key learnings and understand why organizations with complex technology landscapes shouldn’t disregard process intelligence.

The employee benefits insurance provider’s long history and aggressive acquisition-driven growth strategy left it with countless internal systems

This firm specializes in life and disability insurance for employees with a wide catalog of offerings covering dental, illness, and vision insurance. Its corporate history includes a long list of mergers and acquisitions, which led to integration challenges and internal process and data siloes. To that end, the firm embarked on a major digital transformation journey about three years ago to streamline its claims operations business.

Its efforts to gain insight into its processes had been manual and anecdotal, stalling its transformation efforts. Further, employees highlighted different versions of the same processes, underlining inefficiencies and a lack of process standardization but not giving enough information to address them effectively. Eventually, the company turned to process intelligence, but it needed a product that could navigate its unique technology landscape. The Vice President of Digital Strategy explained:

We are an old company. There are a lot of applications we have had for a long time, so an event-log approach may not be effective for us.

– VP, Digital Strategy, a global employee benefits provider

Skan’s “visual” approach to process intelligence helped the benefits provider overcome a complex technology landscape

We’ve written in the past about Skan’s mission to help organizations x-ray their processes and the vendor’s ability to leverage computer vision to comb through an entire series of tasks being performed on a screen across multiple applications and systems. It’s easy to see why this would benefit an organization with such a complex technology landscape. Ultimately, that’s why the employee benefits insurance provider selected Skan, explained the Vice President:

The way Skan approaches the problem is unique. I haven’t seen anybody else doing it like this. While others would tap into internal systems or use event logs, Skan took the approach of visual mining.

– VP, Digital Strategy, a global employee benefits provider

Once deployed, Skan broke down the processes in its claims operations business into individual steps and activities, providing what it described as “visibility at scale.” With this insight, the benefits provider identified countless automation opportunities. For example, it found that many of its employees were still manually sending letters and emails, something it could automate. But it identified more than just automation opportunities; it also found opportunities to streamline processes through standardization and training.

As with any journey, the path to transformation is rarely smooth.

One challenge the employee benefits insurance provider faced, albeit not unique to Skan, was leveraging its tools over longer periods due to the increased burden on hardware, sometimes impacting employee productivity. The benefits provider did note that Skan collaborated to solve this problem. Furthermore, due to continuous changes and new releases in their underlying claims system, Skan’s default data capture mechanism could not function continuously without manual intervention. In response, Skan enabled additional data collection mechanisms to adapt to the changing claims system, which the client claims solved their problem.

The Bottom Line: Skan’s approach to process intelligence resonates well with clients and helps tackle their process inefficiencies, even in complex technology landscapes.

The employee benefits insurance provider needed a process intelligence vendor that could navigate its complex technology landscape, and Skan did exactly that. If you’re considering process intelligence in your organization but are cautious due to your complex technology landscape, Skan’s “visual mining” approach, or another vendor with a similar offering, might be the answer.