ASE improves customer service and retention

Located in Denmark, A-Kassen for Selvstændige (ASE) is a 100 percent member-owned unemployment insurance fund. The company’s mission is to create value and economic security for its members.

Challenge
As a collectively owned unemployment insurance provider, ASE strives to achieve high levels of member retention by supporting members when unfortunate circumstances leave them out of work. Because the insurance industry is so competitive, the company is under constant pressure to keep member costs down while delivering excellent customer service. Because all competing companies offer essentially the same products, ASE must find other ways to differentiate itself within the marketplace. Therefore, the company needed to improve its ability to quickly execute new business initiatives with as little risk as possible. Frequently changing legislation also added to the company’s need to improve its agility and auditability.

ASE also wanted to reduce the turnaround time of the daily benefit entitlements process to seconds. However, because of the complexity of its primary systems, the company’s IT department found it difficult to deliver a solution quickly. The existing platform was not process-centric and required highly skilled staff to drive the process successfully. ASE began looking for a solution that would help improve process agility and transparency as well as customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Solution
After carefully analyzing multiple solutions, ASE engaged IBM and IBM Business Partner Tieto Denmark A/S to implement IBM® Business Process Manager Advanced and IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management software through the IBM Quick Win Pilot program. The program quickly delivered a partial but valuable solution within three months, helping guide ASE through the end-to-end implementation process.

The IBM team used the Business Process Manager Advanced application to provide a layer of abstraction between the company’s existing applications and its business processes. This abstraction helps enable IT staff to more seamlessly replace existing complex systems with more standard, up-to-date applications. The Business Process Manager Advanced application also helps improve business procedures by providing greater visibility into existing processes, helping enable ASE to continually implement improvements. Finally, the new solution helped the organization decrease the turnaround time of its daily benefit entitlements process.

ASE used the WebSphere Operational Decision Management software in combination with the Business Process Manager Advanced BPM platform to automate its benefits calculation process. The two helped enable ASE to streamline subprocesses and automate, optimize and monitor complex decisions, along with the thousands of rules that are frequently changing when calculating entitlements, such as contract of work, hours worked, taxable salary and regulatory stipulations.

Benefits
• Decreases time required to calculate entitlements from 15 minutes to 10 seconds, improving quality of service to members
• Supports the automation of 80 percent of benefits calculations while improving alignment between business strategies and IT objectives
• Enables a new standard for time to market, technical flexibility and auditability