Client Success Stories

We’ve worked with clients in many industries on many types of projects. Here we give you an introduction to some of the highlights.

Business Process Improvement projects

• A merger of two insurance companies impacted the Call Center, which was responsible for handling contacts via phone, email and fax for 70,000 internal and external customers. Call Center management wanted to identify areas of opportunity that would improve productivity and ensure continued customer satisfaction. [read more]

• The claims processing operation of a leading P&C insurance provider was rapidly growing in size and complexity. As this company's portfolio continued to expand, claims processing needed to change to keep up, requiring substantial re-design, enhanced technology support, and new ways of managing the business itself. [read more]

• The largest life insurance company in North America found it difficult to assemble the information for an annuity transfer transaction due to poorly documented business rules, complex state regulations, and a paper-based submission process. Both customers and employees were frustrated. The supporting system only showed the total number of transactions currently in the system, preventing management insight via metrics. [read more]

• After an internal audit identified large dollar discrepancies in the reinsurance area of an insurance company, the organization used Doreen Evans Associates' business analysis approach to identify risks and controls within the reinsurance area. The study recommended consolidation of processing within the Actuarial Department. [read more]

Enterprise Architecture projects

• A large financial services organization wanted to develop a central repository for maintaining and sharing assets among multiple stakeholders. Ultimately, their goal was to build an Enterprise Business Architecture with three views: business (process, organization, and goals), data, and systems. The result was a storehouse of model-based enterprise information available on the company's intranet. [read more]

• In preparation for a system conversion, DEA partnered with the client to re-engineer its major business processes. The goal was to reduce process cycle times and processing costs. The assets developed during the project became the foundation for the client's business enterprise architecture. While these architectures can have a different focus in various organizations, for this client the goal was to document their business areas, including major processes, roles, and supporting systems. [read more]

Requirements projects

• A disability income insurance company needed to develop a reliable actuarial experience study capability to provide the foundation for the organization's strategic analysis. The approach focused on understanding the processes used in the Actuarial area and to study what was truly needed as opposed to what had “always been done”, and then to specify the data requirements that would be necessary for technological support. [read more]

• The client was faced with a critical legacy system reengineering effort, but had no current documentation of the existing system which had been built up over the years by an outside vendor. The goal was to bring the system in-house, to upgrade its user interface, and to reduce the cost of the system. DEA worked with the client for a 10-month period to ensure that existing functionality would be replicated. The result was documentation of over 40,000 requirements that were traced to functional testing scripts. [read more]

• A large life insurance company contracted a system vendor's services group to implement its imaging and workflow product for the company's new business underwriting group. The system was intended to improve productivity and reduce cycle time. However, upon implementation, new business cycle times dramatically increased. In addition, functionality issues seriously impacted producer/agent and customer satisfaction, forcing management to engage in damage control. [read more]

Sarbanes-Oxley support

• This Fortune 500 insurance company was struggling with a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance project. Business process information was difficult to capture using spreadsheets, and version control became unmanageable. A better approach using better tools was needed. [read more]

Methodology Development and Mentoring

• The client's goal was to simplify and consolidate its approach to requirements-gathering across the organization. The decision was made to include process mapping as a key technique of the approach, and then to tie processing steps to functional requirements. This allowed the organization to more readily see where new functionality or updates to existing functionality were required, and to trace business need through to system requirements.[read more]

• As the organization grew, projects across the company were being handled in different ways by different groups. The lack of a unified approach became an issue as developers received requirements in different formats and different levels of detail. The lack of uniformity also meant that business analysts had difficulty transferring their skill sets from one group to another. DEA helped develop a standard, model-driven approach, and then delivered training in the approach across the organization. [read more]

Testing

• The client brought a new insurance product to market which resulted in outsourcing a portion of their case management needs. An in-house system was developed, as well as requirements for the partner organizations whose systems would need to receive or provide data. DEA led an effort to compile, organize and define the User Acceptance Testing phase for validation of the functionality across the multiple systems. [read more]