Smarter workforce management with forecasting at a health insurer

Context & Objectives

A major player in health insurance faced an overwhelming increase in back-office requests. These requests required painstaking and time-consuming, requiring heavy manual treatment. The resulting inefficiencies had significant repercussions on the quality of service but also employee well-being.

Thus, the Agilytic team was asked to find ways to make the whole process more efficient.

Approach

We began by mapping one team’s work conditions: we mapped task load and sources, as well as its management constraints, such as employee availability, skill levels, or the type of assignments. This served as the basis for a pilot that allowed us to quickly iterate on the functionalities crucial to maximizing productivity while adapting day-to-day work distribution to prevailing circumstances.

We then took the tool to the next level by progressively adding other teams. This enabled us to fine-tune its core logic, gradually adapting it to the entire department’s restraints.

Finally, to anticipate potential shortcomings, we set up automatic analyses that provide the client with detailed forecasts on work volume and alerts on missing skills or workforce.

Results

In under 10 weeks, we delivered our client a fully functional tool that laid the groundwork for efficient workforce management over the long term:

• Drastic reduction in repetitive planning and back-office tasks worth at least 2 full-time equivalents when compounded (approximately a 15% efficiency improvement)

• Increase in overall job satisfaction amongst the 400+ back-office team due to the better skills-workload matching, improved quality, and the higher ability to meet targets

• Ability to better estimate future recruitment and training needs