Below you will find case studies showcasing successful  projects from some of our satisfied customers: Case Study #1: Independence Blue Cross - Member ID Cards Business Objective - Independence Blue Cross or IBC engaged to help improve their current ID Card fulfillment processes in an effort to provide the best service to their customers while controlling administrative costs. Each year, IBC produces hundreds of thousands of ID cards for new members and for those who have made benefits changes.This engagement involved a Business Process Re-engineering or BPR effort for their current ID Card fulfillment processes, which incorporated newly established BCBSA standards for ID card information. This standardized ID card will be implemented nationally in all Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans will help ensure that Independence Blue Cross member’s will have easy access to network physicians all over the country physicians all over reduce confusion for providers who are part of the BCBSA national network. Solution - As part of the ID Cards engagement, the following key objectives and goals were accomplished: ► Standardization of the required data elements needed to produce an ID Card ► Significantly decrease the complexity of managing IBC’s ID card process, reducing the number of business rules driving ID card production by 75% ► Development of a standardized structure for business rule creation and maintenance ► Transition of all of the IBC family of companies business (PPO, HMO and Traditional) to the new platform ► Implemented Benefit Exception Management features and SOP which will allow IBC to monitor overall status of the customer’s ID Cards during the fulfillment process to assist with manual email notifications, advanced warning of exceptions and ensure external integration points ► Instituted a formalized QA framework that will provide appropriate change management for the ID Cards program and ensure that the Service Level Agreements established with suppliers are maintained ► Recommended and implemented a new Production Support Model that will provide operations with the ability to handle and manage problem resolution, develop and integrate necessary enhancements and upgrades, and the required reports to assess program performance measuring SLAs and KPIs Benefits Realized - Thanks to , Independence Blue Cross was able to reduce the time it took for the creation of new ID cards in half, while improving the overall accuracy of card information, improving the satisfaction of its membership base. Case Study #2: THOMSON RUETERS - Operations Optimization & Continuous Improvement Business Objective – As a leading provider of decision support solutions that promote informed healthcare decisions affecting more than 150 million U.S. lives, Thomson Reuters Healthcare (TRH) experienced a rapid expansion of their Product Portfolio in a short period of time. TRH needed to ensure supporting business and operational processes were capable of scaling with the anticipated customer growth and resource demand while maintaining the same level of world-class customer support. A2C was selected perform this analysis to include: ► Identify current Critical-to-Quality (CTQ) measures ► Baseline process performance metrics ► Identify potential capacity, resource and/or performance risks ► Perform Causation Analysis for risk areas ► Provide short & long term recommendations that would mitigate/eliminate risks while promoting customer value and satisfaction Solution - ’s Business Architecture & Optimization Practice leveraged a Lean Six Sigma approach to capture, analyze and produce the quantifiable facts and recommendations Thomson Reuters Healthcare desired. Process data from Business/Technical Operations, internal Key Performance Objectives (KPOs) and Product Support structures were gathered and evaluated to ensure capabilities were inline with Critical-to-Quality requirements and the anticipated production increases. Based on this assessment, A2C identified 17 potential process enhancements and/or redesign efforts to meet incremental growth assumptions while promoting tighter quality-driven controls and improved process monitoring through calculated Key Performance Indicators. Benefits Realized – TRH not only gained a project portfolio that outlined requirements to meet specific growth scenarios, but a clear view of how these work efforts satisfied specific customer CTQs by product. Additionally, A2C discovered common operational synergies that contributed to the foundation of “best practices” that would be implemented across all product lines. Thomson Reuters Healthcare and A2C continue its partnership to seek and promote continuous improvement in process efficiencies. Case Study #3: THOMSON RUETERS - Healthcare Data Platform Business Objective – Thomson Healthcare is the leading provider of decision support solutions that help organizations across the healthcare industry improve clinical and business performance. Their solutions inform healthcare decisions affecting more than 150 million U.S. lives. Thomson Healthcare selected A2C to assess the technical and operational health of their core information product systems that support the Provider side of their business, and to propose a strategy that would address their needs to simultaneously: ► Meet new and explosive scalability requirements ► Reduce the latency in processing and publishing provider-submitted data ► Lower overall system complexity, and improve reliability ► Improve transparency to customers, and increase their empowerment ► Reduce to industry norms support staffing skill levels needed for new hires Solution - ’s Information Services practice conducted a top-down and bottom up assessment of Thomson Healthcare’s data warehousing environment , which scrutinized their existing framework’s robustness, root causes for latencies and quality issues, ability to scale, ability to extend to meet future requirements, and operational support profile. Based on this assessment, A2C’s resultant strategy included: ► Implementation plan for reengineering their technical environment, including high-level designs of proposed changes ► Recommendations to improve overall quality while reducing QA effort and latencies ► Realigning their operational support work flow with the proposed, simplified technical framework – which will dramatically streamline and simplify Thomson’s key product delivery platform and operations ► A Technology Roadmap detailing steps to evolve the new technical and operational framework Benefits Realized – Thomson Healthcare now has an viable alternative to their existing environment – one with great potential to be significantly simpler, faster, more scalable, more empowering to customers, and lower cost. A2C continues its relationship with Thomson Healthcare to explore realization of the strategy and recommendations – through technical proofs of concept and feasibility studies, new release designs and planning, and refining and realigning the organizational structure in support of a continuous innovation delivery objective. Case Study #4: SVMC - Server Virtualization Business Objective – Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Center (SVCMC), a large multi location healthcare provider in Manhattan NY, was faced by many of the issues that most hospitals these days are faced with: ► Obsolete, unsupported server hardware and an overcrowded data center ► Applications that needed to run on older unsupported operating systems. ► Lack of a centrally managed enterprise backup solution. ► Maintaining older unsupported thick desktops that were creating a support issue for the desktop support area. SVCMC engaged to perform a virtualization assessment for their environment and then to implement the proposed solution. A2C was also tasked with developing an enterprise backup solution for their current environment. Solution - As part of the Virtualization and Enterprise Backup Project, the following key objectives and goals were accomplished: ► delivered a virtualization assessment report ► A2C built a new high availability VMware Cluster and then migrated old servers into the virtual environment ► Older operating systems were run in a virtual environment allowing them to perform better and run on newer, more reliable hardware ► The SVCMC Data Center rack footprint for these servers was reduced from 12 racks to 1 rack ► Power consumption and heat load in the SVCMC Data Center dropped significantly ► All backups are now managed from a central management interface and contained in a centralized tape management subsystem. ► SVCMC is piloting virtual desktops that will greatly the total cost of ownership for the desktop computing environment Benefits Realized - ► virtualized 140 servers down to 6 VMware ESX servers ► Improved availability and performance of existing applications ► Data Center Savings of 3.5 million in due to environmental, maintenance and downtime savings ► Savings of $350,000.00 from the Enterprise Backup solution due to reduction and reallocation of staff ► Backup time was reduced from not finishing overnight to finishing in 6 hours ► Full backup volume was increased from 1 TB to 10 TB being backed up and sent offsite ► Projected savings for 2009 of 1.2 million if Virtual Desktops are fully implemented Case Study #5: Comcast - Enterprise Data Warehouse Strategy Business Objective – Comcast is the country’s largest provider of cable services - and one of the world’s leading communications companies, focusing on broadband cable, commerce, and content. Comcast selected A2C to elicit, compile, and classify its strategic operational and informational reporting requirements, and to estimate its explosive data volumes and query load over the next 18-30 months - in order to determine if requirements exist that might drive Comcast to use of specialized data warehousing software and/or reporting appliances. Solution - ’s Information Services organization conducted a multi-faceted assessment of Comcast’s strategic reporting needs – measuring both organic growth of existing reporting systems, and driving organizational discussion around anticipated reporting needs based on Comcast’s evolving and growing market. Based on this assessment, A2C’s resultant findings are recommendations included: ► Estimations of data explosion and storage needs for Comcast’s Voice, Data, and Video businesses. ► Empirical forecast / estimation of total informatics data capture and retrieval footprint, based on top-down and bottom-up perspectives of data growth, user community growth, deepening business intelligence and predictive modeling sophistication, and planned analytic application initiatives. ► Recommendations on hybrid data warehousing architectures and frameworks – appropriate to address Comcast’s formidable data streams and broadening reporting needs. ► Next Step recommendations related to feasibility studies and Proofs-of-Concept, to validate, stress-test and benchmark A2C-supplied short-list of reporting technologies and platforms identified as viable candidates for the hybrid architectural component roles. Benefits Realized - Comcast now has identified next steps that will reduce the risk of planned business intelligence investments, and a recommended architectural framework that can extend to address their planned and future data warehousing needs. A2C continues its relationship with Comcast to explore realization of the strategy and recommendations – through technical proofs of concept and feasibility studies in support of a Comcast’s ambitious reporting, information, and insight objectives. |