BY G. BARRY KLEIN, CPCU, CLU
New Web capabilities have made him a hit with agents.
Virtually every boy swings a baseball bat when hes growing up, and many have dreams of playing for a big-league team. Most never get past Little League, but a few still run the bases for high school or college teams.
Harold Williams, CIO of Montana State Fund, nearly made it all the way. After starting college at Virginia Tech, Williams was drafted by the Atlanta Braves, and he couldnt pass up his shot at the dream. But after four-and-a-half seasons in the minor leagues, professional baseball didnt work out for him, and he returned to Columbus, Ohio, his hometown.
There wasnt a lot of demand for baseball skills in the business community, Williams comments, so he went back to school. After earning a two-year degree from Columbus Business Uni-versity, he went to work in 1984 in the home office of Nationwide Insurance as a mainframe COBOL programmer. Pro-fessional athletes tend to be aggressive and competitive, and Williams was no exception. He began climbing the ladder at Nationwide.
Over the next 14 years, Williams received eight promotions while earning his bachelors degree at Ohio Dominican University along the way. My first managerial job was supervisor of commercial billing, Williams recalls. After that, he managed client-server operations as well as technical support and was responsible for Nationwides PeopleSoft implementation. At the end of his tenure at Nationwide, Williams had worked his way up to officer in charge of insurance operations, responsible for the core policy processing systems.
Free enterprise beckoned, and in 1998, Williams and four partners started their own firm, Connaissance Consulting. They specialized in field service operations, CRM implementations, and e-business solutions. In 2002, the partners sold out to a venture capital firm, although Williams stayed on for a while. Later that year, however, an opportunity at Montana State Fund presented itself, and Williams decided to make what he refers to as a major lifestyle change, moving to Helena, Montana, and taking a job as CIO.
The Montana State Fund is a mono-line [workers comp], mono-state carrier, and were the largest writer of workers compensation in Montana, he explains. Although it is a competitive state fund, vying for business with other carriers, it also is the carrier of last resort. We cant turn anyone down, he says, so we have a lot of business in the current hard market. But hard markets dont last forever.
One of the first things he noticed was there was virtually no IT support for the funds independent agents, a situation he set about to remedy. There also were opportunities for cost reductions, including significant areas for improvement in processes and procedures. Williams put together a business process redesign plan in his first 90 days and got the board to sign off and fund it. We were a paper-oriented company, so there was no way to check the status of a claim electronically, find out when the last check was cut, and so on, he says. Not surprisingly, Williams and the State Fund are drawing on the Webs capabilities in moving to a new generation of computing.
One implementation, Health-E-Web, a new system to streamline payments to doctors that treat injured workers, has been a real home run for the carrier. It used to take us more than a month to receive a bill, process it, and pay it. By then, we would get the reminder invoices, compounding the problem. Health-E-Web is a joint venture with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. BC/BS provides the medical services providersthe doctorswith a Web-based system to submit bills. BC/BS parses out the ones that are work related, providing the State Fund with an electronic data feed. Montana State Fund already is receiving more than 40 percent of its bills through this system and expects to get to 70 percent.
It has improved our accuracy dramatically, reduced our costs, and most important, shortened our turnaround time, he asserts. Bills that used to take more than 30 days to process now take less than a week and sometimes as little as a few days. Turning this initiative into a double play, the State Fund is now expanding the program to handle payments to pharmacies, as well, using a different provider for that segment.
So much for the skeptics who said baseball isnt good training for business.
The eQuality Office performance management initiative allows companies to extend their contact center recording, analysis, and e-learning investments to the entire enterprise. As a result, organizations can increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and pinpoint new revenue opportunities through firsthand business intelligence.
When companies identify the underlying motive for calls into the contact center, they frequently find processing delays causing customers to call for status checks, data-entry errors driving customer changes, as well as billing mistakes and unclear information creating customer frustration. Unnecessary repeat calls, due to inadequate back-office processing, often contribute heavily to call volumes.
The eQuality Office performance management initiative originates from the eQuality performance optimization software suite from Witness Systems, creating a distinct bundling of applications that work together to offer unique business drivers and financial benefits.
Company: Professional Data
Management Again
Product: LifePRO
Web site: www.pdmagain.com
Professional Data Management Again, Inc. (PDMA), has released Version 12 of the LifePRO life, health, and annuity administration system. The new version offers significant business enhancements. It utilizes Microsoft SQL Server as its operational database to offer increased ease of data access across the insurance enterprise and includes an active warehousing capability enabling flexible solutions to database administration and data store maintenance.
With LifePRO Version 12, PDMA introduces WebLifePRO, an XML- and browser-based interface providing flexibility in deploying the application across the spectrum of home-office and remote-system users. Access by external applications to LifePRO business functions has been enhanced with the availability of Microsoft .NET-based application programming interfaces. Reporting functions also have been expanded to allow for publishing and disseminating reports and documents in standard PDF files. Major business functionality enhancements are available, as well, in-cluding support for the 2001 CSO Mortality Table. Other major areas offering greater functionality involve health claims administration and agent compensation support.
Company: Fiserv
Product: eFreedom Investment Management
Web site: www.fiserv.com
Fiserv, Inc., has introduced eFreedom Investment Management, an integrated portfolio management and investment accounting solution that supports each step of the trading processfrom order processing through trade execution, accounting, international settlement support, and regulatory reporting. As trading practices become increasingly complex and global, more and more organizations need multi-currency, multibasis investment-accounting capabilities to track business activity.
eFreedom Investment Management supports accounting bases and closing dates to meet the requirements of a companys portfolio. It also manages an array of financial instruments, including debt instruments, mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed securities, collateralized mortgage obligations, equities, and derivatives. Should users discover a transaction that needs to be reversed, a cancel/replace engine automatically unwinds and rebuilds all related transactions.
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