Korie Jackson, Technical Consultant Stream Lead NA, FINEOS, provides a review of the customer case study given by MTS at the FINEOS Claims Global Summit 2013 which took place in Toronto last week.
I want to start this blog off by asking you a question ‘What can you do in 9 months?’ Andy Beardsall, who is the IT administrator for Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS) presented on their recent project implementation of FINEOS 7.5. MTS was a winner of the FINEOS Innovation and Excellence award for maximizing use of FINEOS base product, to achieve a project go-live in less than a year utilizing claims and payments. Andy took us through how he achieved this great success. MTS had a number of reasons for wanting to implement FINEOS that centered around gaining more efficiencies in their claims processing, e-files and taking advantage of some of the key features in the product around medical codes and invoice tracking. I’ll take you through some key points below from Andy’s presentation.
When MTS began their project implementation in early 2013 their principal objectives were to:
- Improve their claims processes.
- Improve reliability of reporting.
- Ease coverage of cases and claims.
- Move to a product that has ongoing support and a product roadmap.
Andy pointed out the following items were key contributors to the success of his project:
- He felt the training that he and his team took provided him with the framework and exposure therapy to confidently attack the implementation. The training courses ranged from configuration to data model training that FINEOS’ Corporate University offers. He exposed his whole team to the training to ensure comfort level was at its highest with the FINEOS application.
- Another thing that Andy felt contributed to the project success was a very good communication and change management plan. Keeping the team engaged early and often eased any doubts about the project as well as the product.
- Minimal customizations was a major contributor to the overall success of the project. MTS felt that FINEOS base product offered a great match to their business needs and with some configuration, FINEOS was a system that the end-users could get excited about. They kept the customizations to items that would truly have a business impact, such as summer salary calculations which is teacher specific. Andy mentioned that taking this approach did require some organizational flexibility.
There were also a few key indirect items that Andy felt contributed to the success of the project:
- The FINEOS documentation site which has a lot of valuable product information, allowed Andy and his team to get fully immersed in what FINEOS truly offers.
- FINEOS business content also played a key role as Andy had a starting point, and this gave him a baseline of configuration to start the project with.
- Having a sandpit environment setup sooner than later, allowed Andy and team to play around with FINEOS and see the results real-time.
- Having a bank of time allocated for FINEOS services, allowed Andy and team to pick the brain of FINEOS consultants on an adhoc basis when they came across issues.
By taking advantage of the business content and sticking closely to the base product, MTS was able to create a business success with FINEOS in less than a year. So I asked in the beginning what can you do in 9 months, and the answer is implement an enterprise claims system by the name of FINEOS at MTS. The next step for Andy and team is more technical training around development, so that MTS can become even more self-sufficient in supporting the FINEOS application moving forward. Truly a great success story presented by Andy and well-deserving of the FINEOS Innovation and Excellence award.
