Our client is one of New Zealand’s largest nationwide provider of community health, disability and wellbeing group, supporting over 30,000 people to get on with making the most of life in their own homes, communities and work places. Our client has been successful in building capabilities and innovating services to support the community better. These capabilities are sourced from different business lines that work in conjunction depending on the needs of clients. A priority for our client is to ensure their customers are supported in a highly efficient manner with consistent customer experience.

The Challenge

Our client needed external assistance to generate improvement ideas for addressing inefficiencies and inconsistencies in processes. These inefficiencies in many cases resulted in excessive manual effort and ultimately a higher cost to serve clients. In particular a core process was processing claims on behalf of clients for government funding. This process comprised of a number of administrative resources from different business lines.

Key Outcomes

Our engagement helped our client achieve the following outcomes:

1. Captured the current-state processes of client claims for each business line to show variations
2. Developed a single ideal-state process for client claims that would provide consistency between the business lines
3. Identified measurable value-added vs. non-value-added effort in both current-state and ideal-state processes
4. Generated several improvement ideas to the claims process with the potential to:
   1. remove signficant manual effort resulting in annual operational savings
   2. standardise client and employee journies across business lines
   3. successfully ran Lean event workshops virtually with attendees from various branches.

Our Difference

We provided key differentiators to traditional consulting approaches:

1. Structured approach leveraging best practice Lean value stream analysis and mapping
2. Highly engaging workshops designed for remote sessions using virtual whiteboard
3. Deep experience with examples from other organisations to provide insights
4. Data gathering templates and accelerators to automate Lean analysis
5. Strong focus on stakeholder alignment to ensure change journey towards improvement implementation
6. Simple, but comprehensive reporting and documentation suitable for executive as well as teams.

Conclusion

We facilitated an approach that successfully generated improvement ideas based on measurable benefits to reduce the cost to serve. This provided our client with a strong case for change to create efficiency and consistency in processes. This was performed in an accelerated timeframe to realise benefits sooner.

If you’re looking for a trusted advisor for process excellence, with a difference, contact us.