CRM Solves Consumer Demand While State Agency Goes Green

3 Year Return, $14.4m ROI

A Business Value Analysis conducted by Lawrence Associates indicates that a State Agency's investment of $5 million in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to process disability claims will save at least $6.75m annually. The initiative will generate a 3-year Return on Investment (ROI) of $14.4M with a payback period of 9 months. Automating another segment of the states paperwork, similar to the disability initiative, will free up resources to handle growing consumer demand without adding incremental headcount. Cutting processing time in half will also significantly improve consumer satisfaction with the agency as it goes green.

OVERVIEW
Client: State Government Region: United States Vertical: Public Sector, State Government Client Profile: State Office handling 120,000 disability claims per year and growing. Business Situation: As the national economy moves into a recession, more consumers find themselves in need of state provided services, having lost their job related support. At the same time state budgets are shrinking. Solution: Microsofts Dynamics CRM platform was used as a base and deployed to the state agency offices. It enabled all consumer information to be stored in one central location, while making it accessible to each agency office handling claims. What was previously a 2-6 week process for updating records was cut in half.

Situation
The State Government Agency faced daunting challenges - while budgets were being carefully scrutinized and reduced, the demand for their services grew. The national economy was moving into a recession, and more consumers found themselves losing their job-related disability support and in need of state-provided services. There were about 120,000 consumers in the system, and the numbers were growing rapidly. Each consumer's Individualized Account Records required updating semiannually, generating 240,000 paper documents. It generally took 2-6 weeks to successfully process a consumers Account Profile. 3,600 coordinators handled on average 140,000 disability an forms annually. Additionally, approximately 73,000 consumers were receiving Medicaid service coordination, generating another 100,000 in documents per year. From the years 2000 to 2008, the growth in the number of Medicaid recipients had risen dramatically by 63% - from 45,535 to 74,177. The old paper process was largely manual, from locating and collecting the data necessary to complete the applications, mailing or faxing those documents, exchanging incomplete or inaccurate forms via mail or fax, to finally having a data entry clerk process the information into the recording system. The sheer volume of paper that arrived daily created bottlenecks in processing, as the mailroom needed to receive, log, sort and then deliver documents to the appropriate coordinators for processing. As the volume grew, more personnel, more office space, more paper, ink & storage were needed.

Provides full visibility on each consumers application. Errors are drastically reduced and the wait time for mail processing is eliminated.

Page 2

CRM Solves Consumer Demand

Solution
Technical solutions are only valuable to an organization when their features or overall functions support that organizations critical success factors (CSFs). In examining the agencys 2008-2012 Strategic Plan, opportunities were identified that would improve certain business processes: the document processing and handling activities. Its a valuable cache of institutional knowledge, providing full visibility into status of tasks and next steps.

Organizational Assessment providing visual linkage between the Agency CSFs and the Dynamics Solution

Moving the document processing from paper to an automated solution greatly increased the operational efficiency of the Agency. The old, mostly manual process is contrasted with the new automated version in the process flow diagrams on page 4.

Please see Solution on page 4

CRM Solves Consumer Demand

Page 3

Benefits
The agency estimated that the 3,600 Coordinators spent 75% of their time in non-face-to-face activities, half of which was document processing. Automating transactions eliminated the need for mailroom processing and data entry personnel efforts. Local clerks and District Coordinators realized significant time savings in completing and validating forms. Those efficiencies provide nearly 250,000 available hours, or approximately 135 FTE, that subsequently became available to handle the annual growing consumer demand. The increased operational efficiency and elimination of paper processing, mailroom hours and data entry also reduced cycle time for processing consumer activity. Cutting cycle time of 2-6 weeks by more than half significantly improved consumer satisfaction with the agency. Automating document processing produced other benefits: More accuracy in medical claims. Measurable staff productivity: automating the document process provided the opportunity to quantitatively measure the amount of time needed for processing forms, and the amount of time spent between activities. Forecasting future needs and budgeting for those needs will become more accurate. Online documents provide the capability to improve the overall consistency of the data being entered, and eliminate inaccuracies due to illegible handwriting. With the decrease in mail, costs associated with mailroom processing dropped. Paper costs dropped as well with the elimination of paper documents, along with the long term costs of storing those documents (floor space, files, etc.), lending a solid Green tag to this initiative. Agency supervisors now have a verifiable audit trail of all work that has been completed, allowing for more objective job performance reporting. Overall, the changes led to markedly improved employee and consumer satisfaction. Complaints regarding long processing time and/or incomplete or lost forms were greatly diminished.

fits Bene
Reduce time/FTE in document processing Consistent document quality More accurate medical claims Time spent sending documents eliminated Decrease in mail/mailroom cost Verifiable audit trail Measurable staff productivity Decrease in data entry costs Decrease in paper, ink, floorspace, cabinets, costs Consumer spends less time on document preparation Turnaround for Consumer applications & updates greatly improved

Agency Value

Consumer Value

Impact Legend High Medium Low None

Page 4
Solution from page 2

CRM Solves Consumer Demand

The new solution, utilizing Microsofts Dynamic CRM product, gives the local office clerks online access to previously recorded consumer information, speeding the entry process. The online form is prepopulated with available data, also reducing the time necessary to complete the forms. The online application prompts the office clerk to complete additional forms if necessary, reducing the number of documents returned from the district due to inaccurate or incomplete information.

Conclusions
The decision to replace the old manual process with an automated solution was a critical necessity for the Agency in order to keep up with the burgeoning growth of their needy constituents. The decision to utilize Microsofts Dynamics CRM allowed the Agency to fit the solution to their strategic framework. The Agency is planning to expand the use of their new CRM solution into other process applications, to further improve agency efficiencies, save money in personnel, office space, and storage while better meeting consumer demand.
Lawrence Associates is a professional services firm that supports our business partners: proving the business value of proposed solutions, developing Sales & Technical Readiness and Application & Product Development. Our three integrated practice areas leverage our extensive experience working side by side with field sales, services, partners and marketing teams with their efforts to help customers realize the true value of consuming technology solutions. We rely on our intimate knowledge of what, how, and why customers make purchasing decisions to develop targeted training, marketing collateral, business value assessments and sales enablement solutions.

Lawrence Associates LLC

3 Totten Drive Bridgewater, NJ 08807 Phone: 908-762-2100 x116 E-mail: morlowicz@lawrence-associates.com