How an Insurer Increased Productivity with an Operations Excellence Program

The Situation

A leading national insurance company reached out to Burnie Group to deliver and implement frontline employee leadership training, and ultimately provide full-time employee cost savings. While being highly proficient at the production work of the role, frontline leaders were siloed in their own teams. They lacked team and departmental coordination methods. As a result, teams were not leveraging their counterparts to offset, coordinate, and share workload and staff. Reporting on work completed and pending was high-level and provided limited actionable information. In addition, staff were not objectively and universally measured on performance, making performance conversations highly subjective and different from leader to leader. Measurement was almost solely based primarily on a small sample-sized survey of customer experience.

The Solution

Burnie Group implemented our operations excellence program through weekly modules that include capacity and resource planning, performance dashboards, team huddles and coaching and feedback training. The program leverages technology to map end-to-end processes and automatically capture the day-to-day activities of client team members. Through advanced analytics, we painted a clear picture of individual, team and corporate performance, allowing for an increase in productivity while enhancing employee engagement and the customer experience.

The Result

The operations excellence program was rolled out to approximately 1000 full-time employees nationally. As performance tracking and work planning became part of their norm, much more thought was put into capacity alignment, managing backlog, and performance. Employee engagement increased by introducing the daily huddles –  short, early morning conversations on progress, critical messages, priorities for the day, and general news – to frontline teams. The insurer experienced a 22% increase in productivity, a 12% decrease in the cost of service delivery, and 11.3% full-time equivalent savings. A leader at the insurance company said, “The program has allowed me to better plan my team’s workload and set expectations in terms of how heavy the load will be on any given day and what my team needs stay focused and productive.”

Burnie Group helps clients improve their businesses through innovative strategy and the continuous pursuit of operations excellence. We apply rigorous analysis, world-class technology and top-tier expertise to invigorate your business. As you look to embark on the RPA journey, let Burnie Group be your guide.