Improving Efficiency

The Challenge:

Corporately, Morneau Shepell was looking to create an Organizational Effectiveness group in order to continue being the largest HR Consulting and Outsource company in Canada.  As a pilot, the Health and Benefits Outsourcing group was selected.

The division has seen significant growth over the years, has high variability in the type of work they perform making it difficult to plan resources, has seasonality with fluctuations in volumes, and is extremely sensitive to providing exceptional customer service.

The project was focused on the following areas: Administration, call centre, and Implementation in multiple locations within Canada and the United States.

The Results:

Overall – the Participants per FTE (productivity metric) have improved between 14 and 15% including in year improvements as well as improvements budgeted for scalability.

Call Centre productivity is has improved between 6% and 36% by:

• Creating new tools using Erlang C to better align staffing levels to call volumes while maintaining required service level agreements.
• Optimizing handle time by linking and managing after call time.

Admin productivity is has improved between 5% and 15%.

• Modifications made to the peer review process.
• Elimination of unnecessary project activities.
• Standardization of processes and best practices across the organization.

Implementation productivity is has improved between 9% and 27%.

• Modifications were made to the organizational structure
• Modifications were made to the onboarding process both the inputs and outputs

In addition new metrics were created to allow Service Leaders and Directors to monitor and re-act to variances in performance in real time.

The cultural shift within the organization was also evident to the executive group.