Achieve staggering improvements in cycle time, reliability and cost reduction when using Decision Coordinator to implement a new workflow across all the software applications your people use every day.

Client Goal

Vastly reduce the number of employees needed to support the companies new service offering by increasing flow-thru automation of service delivery, automatically turning back incorrectly written service orders, and reducing the complexity of work that isn't automated.

Business Challenge

A new service roll-out was consuming more manual effort than was originally anticipated, as the marketing organization increased the number of options available to customers, options that were difficult to correctly capture on service orders and options customers were changing frequently. As complexity and volumes increased the work center found themselves hiring staff at an unsustainable rate and cost.Solution

ServiceSPAN provided replacement software between the network elements providing the service and the client's mainframe ordering, billing, surveillance, and repair systems with a goal of achieving 99% flow-thru on all USOC/FID style service orders.

Next ServiceSPAN provided a customer care capability based on Decision Coordinator to enabled support teams to troubleshoot customer issues on the service platforms and their connected systems. The solution provided a single common interface over the three different manufacturer service platforms that were in use.

The solution included identifying likely service order errors to turn back to sales and prepare the customer care team to respond correctly if a customer called before the order was corrected.

Results

• A solution was configured to deliver enhanced service to customers by quickly identifying incorrect service orders in advance and providing automatic flow to the voice messaging peripheral and switch.
• Improved the processes of provisioning and maintenance issues, increasing efficiency from 60 to 99% flow through.
• Lowered head count supporting the product from an original 1 per 7,000 customers in service, to 1 for each 115,000 customers in service.
• Provided help desk with a comprehensive set of tools to resolve customer issues and to monitor performance.

When you absolutely need to reduce the cycle time in your customer care organization and throwing bodies at the challenge just isn't an option.

Client Goal

To radically reduce the average cycle time diagnosing and re-dispatching on customer troubles that failed the first attempt at repair, so that many more customer troubles could be resolved in the 24 hour commitment window.

Business Challenge:

When the first attempt to restore customer service fails, there is often one last chance to fix the problems before a 24 hour out-of- service clock counts down to zero, and service penalties accrue. A group of Tier 2 telephony and video service experts look to beat the clock reviewing original customer complaints, what was learned from a failed repair attempt, so that they can re-diagnose and escalate the fix to an employee with the right knowledge and with fingers closest to where the repair needs to happen before the clock reaches zero.

Historically tickets arrived with less than 6 hours to time zero. With an average cycle time of 10 hours, the clock would run out while in the hands of this team or with the employee the repair was escalated to, and the result was the clock reaching zero 70% of the time ... BOOM!

In an earlier attempt to do better, many people were added to the group, but throwing bodies on the problem did not help.

Solution

Decision Coordinator was used to automate picking up tickets from the customer care mainframes, researching past fix attempts and providing employees a new tool for decision support.

Decision Coordinator fostered a tempo of making excellent decisions fast and using new automation to execute on those decisions while employees moved onto the next repair ticket. If a customer needed to be contacted and was not available at the time, Decision Coordinator would manage a queue of customers to contact again and/or wait on a call back.

Before Decision Coordinator, the customer had many excellent automation functions, a voice response unit, and a workflow and expert tool overlaying the customer care system that was successful for Tier-1 employees. Decision Coordinator worked in concert with these solutions, including a BPM orchestration engine, so that advanced functions could happen between groups, such as updating in real-time which Tier-2 employee had work on their desktop so that a chance call from an incoming customer could be directed to them, or if not yet on a user desktop, a Tier-1 employee could take over and assist the customer live.

Results

• ServiceSPAN provided a complete decision support tool that was quickly configured to work with the clients existing applications within 12 weeks.
• Employees can now perform work at a much faster tempo, with sub-tasks automated so they can spend more time making excellent decisions and less time swivel-chairing between many different screens in legacy repair application.
• Reduced the need for skill specialization among employees.
• Slashed cycle time, from when a ticket arrives to when it is re-dispatched, by a factor of 10, down to 1 hour.
• Reduced total employees needed to achieve goals from 18 full-time equivalent employees per shift to just 2 per shift.

Functionalized Workflow: Every aspect of your center, working within a streamlined process, ensuring efficiency, visibility and accountability.

Client Goal

To more efficiently utilize the talents of workers in a well-run telecom work center that was positioned to migrate from their current system to a new platform, as a result of a merger. Prior to the migration, the center was also behind in their workload. Client stated a desire to replace cradle to grave ownership of issues with functionalized workflow.

Business Challenge

This organization provides communications and data services to residential, business, governmental and wholesale customers in 36 US states. In the circuit provisioning department of this organization, a worker owned a customer order from cradle to grave. To more efficiently utilize the skills of the workers, the organization desired to distribute work in an assembly line fashion. As part of the provisioning process, phone calls were needed to coordinate access to customer premises as well as testing the circuits when the installations are completed. Customer calls and other administrative tasks needed to be rerouted, allowing highly skilled technical workers more time to test additional circuits, etc.

The organization was also facing work process non-compliance issues. For example, when a new circuit is installed, the process dictates that specific notes about the circuit must be logged into the provisioning system. Very often, the notes were incomplete or not posted at all, leaving repair technicians with little or no information to troubleshoot problems when they arise.

Solution

During our 20/20 Analysis, we uncovered benefits that could be achieved by automating some of the manual tasks, and the project team decided the solution was to be delivered in two phases. In the first phase, ServiceSPAN was able to identify and eliminate the backlog, and create a single GUI experience for the department. We enabled functionalized workflow where work is pushed to users with the right skills, at the appropriate time and enabled standardized and enforced posting of information to the provisioning system.

Automation of two specific manual tasks was delivered in the second phase, eliminating users having to copy and paste information into web forms as a means of sending emails to customers. Rules were configured in Decision Coordinator to automatically send the notifications when conditions are met. Also, users no longer had to manually kick off tests that can take as long as 50 minutes to complete and monitor for the results. Instead, they initiate tests in Decision Coordinator which now kicks off the tests and monitors the test results. When the tests are successful, Decision Coordinator auto-closes the orders; otherwise, the orders are pushed to users for manual intervention.

Results

ServiceSPAN configured Decision Coordinator to reduce work complexity and provided a user environment that allows employees to efficiently receive and perform their work and the tools to make better decisions.

• Improve manual and automated screening functions with flexible critical date work distribution capabilities that support functionalized workflow.
• Smoothly integrated existing and additional automation software into manual processes.
• Enabled functionalized service order workflow and combine multiple regions into a single, virtual work center for work, reports and dashboards.
• Increase work handling efficiency with single user interfaces, correlations of local and national orders, integration of external websites, sub-task automation and standardization of information posted to external systems.

Achieve staggering improvements in cycle time, reliability and cost reduction when using Decision Coordinator to implement a new workflow across all the software applications your people use every day.

Client Goal

• Vastly improve the advanced notice customers receive, that company is cancelling their appointment, to at least the day before.
• Improve how customers are contacted when facilities are available, so a new appointment can be scheduled.
• Increase efficiencies so they can shrink their on-shore team 40%.
• Increase productive use of off-shore team for handling a specific issue that is not complicated.

Business Challenge

• Inability to staff for peak volumes was leading to runaway inefficiencies as employees attempted to cope with highest priority work. For example, customers were not being contacted timely that a commitment for a technician dispatch was being cancelled for lack of facilities, new service or repair.
• The variety of services being handled, and where the work was arriving from, prevented management from having visibility to workload or predict needed overtime.
• Management attempts to change business processes were being stymied by the inability of existing software to be modified to support new process management designed.
• Employees lost valuable productive time figuring out what work was their' s in new process, would eventually not follow new process.

Solution

With close integration to the client's main-line applications for ordering, repair, inventory, delayed order issues, and engineering referrals Decision Coordinator:

• Watches for new events in enterprise applications originally monitored by employees for their work. Based on events forwards work to employees or to automation in a new workflow that overlays those applications. (enterprise applications work "as is", with no change necessary)
• When manual work is involved, automates every possible task up to the point where manual intervention is needed.
• Propels employees into action, with information presented to the right people, at the right time, supporting the steps and decisions they need to act on.
• Takes button click choices made by your employees and automates the many repetitive tasks that would follow their decisions, so they can quickly move onto their next task.
• Provides your employees the information they need on the spot to assist inbound callers of all types, including company technicians, sales teams and customers.
• Measures the work employees were assigned, the actions they performed and how long it took, enabling supervisors to hold people accountable for following process and achieving results.
• Generates electronic communications to wholesalers and large customers when appropriate or necessary.
• Provide management with real-time visibility into workload to understand staffing needs throughout the day, and auto assign work to employees, based on manager's perception of the best strategy to use their available people.

Results

• Off-shore teams able to perform additional tasks at lower cost
• On-shore head count saving goal 100% achieved.
• On-shore team able to execute work in correct priority order never missing the need to contact customers about cancelled appointments a day or more in advance.

Our 20/20 Analysis starts with a discussion of your areas of responsibility, priorities, challenges and goals.

We arrange a 1 or 2 day on-site visit to observe employees as they perform tasks and meet with managers to learn your processes and how work is tracked, measured and reported. We will regroup to share findings of our analysis and discuss potential methods to aggressively increase productivity and the next steps toward engagement. Then, illustrate how new technologies, customized to solve work center challenges identified during the analysis, will help you achieve your goals and ROI.

Our professional services team can write IT requirements to save time, eliminate risk and accelerate projects. The Analysis will return an ROI and we guarantee the return on investment will equal more than 20 times the cost of our analysis, or money back. ServiceSPAN complements Six Sigma and Lean process, identifying even more aggressive opportunities to reduce costs. We solve integration constraints and deliver how to implement process change when IT resources are constrained.

We focus on:

• Inefficient Work Distribution Mechanism
• Uneven Employee Workload
• Inadequate Research Tools
• Limited Accountability
• Non-Value Added Work Waste
• Lost Automation Opportunities

The proposal design clearly articulates objectives, ROI and establishes a guaranteed deployment timetable, better positioning you to submit and obtain funding. Our team performs quality and integration tests, providing full support during the acceptance testing phase in preparation for the deployment to production environment.

We train your IT Department, application administrators and supervisors. You train your end users. We are on-site to support your training activities and customers.

Decision Coordinator provides unique capabilities to layer task, customer account, and geographic location specific limitations to employees and third parties accessing applications and devices on your network.

With these limitations in place, your organization can more flexibly grant extremely limited access to your systems to match the scope of the work an employee is assigned. Possible applications include:

• For managed services, granting your employees access to customer systems you manage, only for the brief time there is a verified need, such as an existing work task assigned to an employee or employee group.
• Severely limiting access for employees working off-site of your facilities, such as employees working from home.
• Meeting government restrictions to prevent data on sensitive federal accounts and facilities from ever being transmitted overseas.

Information access is no longer just about passwords and audit trails. You need to provide employees and third parties very limited access to your data, so there is no opportunity to misuse your business or customer data, especially when users are outside the USA, in regions where they cannot be prosecuted for stealing information.

We do this and enhance information access as well, giving a smart 'task oriented' experience to third parties, for example, smartly combining information from multiple applications so the user has all the information needed to make perfect decisions without having to learn the navigation of your application stack. Example, combining order, provisioning, inventory and contact information.

Information access is also about measuring and holding third parties accountable for their work effort. Do you want to be paying a company a lot of money to perform a difficult task, only to find out they perform that work in 30 seconds, or that they failed to follow all the steps of the contracted process?

ServiceSPAN's Decision Coordinator software will measure and manage each of the above, and much more to eliminate wasted time. For example, if a third party is working a customer issue in another country, but the customer calls your staff in the USA, in real-time your employee can pull the work away from the third party and fix it live with the customer, rather than risk duplicate effort.

High Level Features:

• Route manual work that needs to be done, such as errors, orders, adjustments, claims, emails, case management and billing (e.g. 'work item') to the lowest cost, most appropriately skilled employees to do the work, both in your business and to third parties. Routing can be based on user skills, multi-language capability, types of providers, types of service, $ amount, or other specific criteria.
• Users cannot surf company applications as they please. They can only see information in company applications pertinent to the pending work assigned to them.
• DC overlays your existing applications, to show users only what they need to see for their assigned role in working a 'work item'.
• DC tracks which orders and customers have open issues, compares it to the workflow that is needed to resolve an open issue, and determines which users of your applications should be granted granular access.
• Provide a smart display to users of only the information they need to get the job done for pending 'work items'. Do they need to see the customer name? Do they need to see available inventory or other resources? If not, we prevent it.
• Provide a filter as to information that can be sent back into your applications, to prevent users from making bad entries or entries that prevent future automation. If information needs to be posted to multiple systems, have the user enter it once, and have DC write it correctly to multiple systems.
• DC measures minutes and seconds of how much time users are spending on each item of work, offers a checklist as progress is made and determines if your costs are in line with the level of work.
• DC will use information from multiple systems, to measure the quality of work performed by users. Know which employees are not being managed correctly, and quickly root out training, skill level, or employee quality issues that are costing the business money.
• See our web-site to learn how we operationalize your data analytics investment and integrate machine learning into your process while providing data security.
• For users that access network elements, DC can extend this same security capability to other systems. DC can use the same logic as above to grant or deny access to specific network elements related to a specific task, and if so, proxy access to the network element in a new GUI window for the user. This saves time and complexity for users accessing the network element and associating what they did with when they accessed the network element in security logs.

Decision Coordinator provides unique capabilities to layer task, customer account, and geographic location specific limitations to employees and third parties accessing applications and devices on your network.

With these limitations in place, your organization can more flexibly grant extremely limited access to your systems to match the scope of the work an employee is assigned. Possible applications include:

• For managed services, granting your employees access to customer systems you manage, only for the brief time there is a verified need, such as an existing work task assigned to an employee or employee group.
• Severely limiting access for employees working off-site of your facilities, such as employees working from home.
• Meeting government restrictions to prevent data on sensitive federal accounts and facilities from ever being transmitted overseas.

Information access is no longer just about passwords and audit trails. You need to provide employees and third parties very limited access to your data, so there is no opportunity to misuse your business or customer data, especially when users are outside the USA, in regions where they cannot be prosecuted for stealing information.

We do this and enhance information access as well, giving a smart 'task oriented' experience to third parties, for example, smartly combining information from multiple applications so the user has all the information needed to make perfect decisions without having to learn the navigation of your application stack. Example, combining order, provisioning, inventory and contact information.

Information access is also about measuring and holding third parties accountable for their work effort. Do you want to be paying a company a lot of money to perform a difficult task, only to find out they perform that work in 30 seconds, or that they failed to follow all the steps of the contracted process?

ServiceSPAN's Decision Coordinator software will measure and manage each of the above, and much more to eliminate wasted time. For example, if a third party is working a customer issue in another country, but the customer calls your staff in the USA, in real-time your employee can pull the work away from the third party and fix it live with the customer, rather than risk duplicate effort.

High Level Features:

• Route manual work that needs to be done, such as errors, orders, adjustments, claims, emails, case management and billing (e.g. 'work item') to the lowest cost, most appropriately skilled employees to do the work, both in your business and to third parties. Routing can be based on user skills, multi-language capability, types of providers, types of service, $ amount, or other specific criteria.
• Users cannot surf company applications as they please. They can only see information in company applications pertinent to the pending work assigned to them.
• DC overlays your existing applications, to show users only what they need to see for their assigned role in working a 'work item'.
• DC tracks which orders and customers have open issues, compares it to the workflow that is needed to resolve an open issue, and determines which users of your applications should be granted granular access.
• Provide a smart display to users of only the information they need to get the job done for pending 'work items'. Do they need to see the customer name? Do they need to see available inventory or other resources? If not, we prevent it.
• Provide a filter as to information that can be sent back into your applications, to prevent users from making bad entries or entries that prevent future automation. If information needs to be posted to multiple systems, have the user enter it once, and have DC write it correctly to multiple systems.
• DC measures minutes and seconds of how much time users are spending on each item of work, offers a checklist as progress is made and determines if your costs are in line with the level of work.
• DC will use information from multiple systems, to measure the quality of work performed by users. Know which employees are not being managed correctly, and quickly root out training, skill level, or employee quality issues that are costing the business money.
• See our web-site to learn how we operationalize your data analytics investment and integrate machine learning into your process while providing data security.
• For users that access network elements, DC can extend this same security capability to other systems. DC can use the same logic as above to grant or deny access to specific network elements related to a specific task, and if so, proxy access to the network element in a new GUI window for the user. This saves time and complexity for users accessing the network element and associating what they did with when they accessed the network element in security logs.

Achieve staggering improvements in cycle time, reliability and cost reduction when using Decision Coordinator to implement a new workflow across all the software applications your people use every day.

With close integration to your data sources and main-line applications for ordering, inventory, dispatch, facility recovery, and more, Decision Coordinator:

• Finds all the work your employees need to be doing and automates every possible task up to the point where manual intervention is needed.
• Provides a single access to all the applications employees need to perform their work.
• Propels employees into action, with information presented to the right people, at the right time, supporting the steps and decisions they need to act on.
• Takes button click choices made by your employees and automates the many repetitive tasks that would follow their decisions, so they can quickly move onto their next task.
• Watches for events in all your enterprise applications related to your orders, and uses them to improve workflow and service delivery.
• Provides your employees the information they need on the spot to assist inbound callers of all types, including company technicians, sales teams and customers.
• Measures the work employees were assigned, the actions they performed and how long it took, enabling supervisors to hold people accountable for following process and achieving results.

When communication or collaboration is needed with other employees, vendors and customers, we engage your email, text messaging, or mobile applications to get more information combined in a formal workflow with tracking, ensuring the ball never gets dropped.

ServiceSPAN consults with you and your business leaders on the requirements for your data driven solution to operationalize a target process improvement, works with your IT department to understand available types of access to systems and their standards for onboarding a turn-key product. With that we provide a fixed price, create the configuration that talks to your systems and people to create sticky process change that will continue long after you take your eyes off it. We guarantee our solution is successful, or we continue configuring it until your goals are achieved.

With our technology, you can achieve the benefits of business transformation, process consolidation, best practice implementation and more... without the cost of actually consolidating the multiple pieces of software you use today to in your business.

Is the software you want to use a barrier to accomplishing your strategic goals?
Are there gaps in the functionality you must fill?

Our software technology, domain knowledge and experience can be instrumental in reducing the impact Performing Provider Systems DSRIP projects will have on their partner IT organizations, at a time those organizations are burdened with many changes in transforming hospital IT systems.

We provide a combination of capabilities that overcome the limitations of existing software applications, enabling cloud (e.g. PPS applications) and legacy (hospital system) applications to work better together. We also effectively layer additional capabilities to cloud based applications, where the vendor does not want to customize their application.

While new healthcare solutions will require some software applications to be added and changed, ServiceSPAN has an alternative for changing or replacing some existing legacy applications.

Through a combination of unique software and systems integration work we provide, new capability is added to existing software applications with a minimum of IT resources needed from overcommitted IT departments.

ServiceSPAN provides software and integration services to lessen the burden of process transformation on health care employees, consolidating applications, and providing an integrated decision support workstation to efficiently process work without having to swivel chair between many legacy and cloud-based applications and web-sites. For example, a care navigator can be provided supporting information to perform their job more efficiently with a smart presentation of information from multiple applications, based on contractual requirements and processes that are relevant to a patient episode and payer.

Taking this to another level, rather than hospital system employees accessing PPS applications as an isolated new workflow used only when a patient is covered by Medicaid, our application will improve the overall experience of the employee performing their job by smartly enabling them to follow different processes for Medicaid in region (PPS applications), Medicaid out of region (neighboring PPS's applications), Medicare, and commercial payers. Hospital systems will find it more flexible to have the same employee work the process across all types of payers in this way.

As PPS DSRIP projects require information sharing, new workflows, and new applications to touch its many PPS partners, ServiceSPAN technology reduces rather than increases the impact on administration employees of each partner and their IT resources, further raising the prospect that DSRIP projects will complete on time, in budget and with the least amount of risk and disruption to the operation.

Our software product can also serve as a unifying technology across multiple DSRIP projects, so that each PPS partner has fewer web-sites and integration points in supporting all projects.

Come find out why we were selected CIO Review Magazine's 20 Most Promising Workflow Solution Providers based on our success at providing Fortune 100 companies innovative solutions for their toughest integration challenges or play the following video for 2 more minutes of information.

ServiceSPAN's Decision Coordinator uses automation intelligence to streamline, prioritize, and share data from multiple sources, present it in a single, simple work environment, empowering staff to make better decisions, quickly.

The combination of human process optimization and workflow management technology ensures greater successful process integration and the improved continuity of patient care. Our technology targets the elimination of complex and redundant work, improving workflow to achieve speed and agility in areas such as:

• Streamlining Advanced Beneficiary Notices process (eliminating write-offs)
• Reducing order entry pricing/coding errors
• Routing calls requiring additional attention
• Providing a multiple system visualization of requisitions
• Lowering Discharge Not Final Bill (DNFB)
• Implementing denial prevention strategy
• Integration of Revenue Cycle processes

Decision Coordinator assists in the research, extraction and organization of data that is external to your system, but critical to the completion of your processes.

Decision Coordinator is a configurable software product that overlays existing applications, to achieve dramatic new capabilities either alone or in combination with cloud applications. Impressive systems integration capability enables the output of one software application to impact the workflow of another, and provide a browser based application, ideal for work environments where employees need to receive and share information in order to make excellent decisions quickly, within rapidly changing organizational conditions.