Success Stories

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City Gains Visibility into Business Processes and Cuts Additional Staffing Costs with Daptiv

Business Issue

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, a health insurance company, serves nearly 900,000 members in 32 counties in greater Kansas City, northwest Missouri, and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas. Nationally, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield system – composed of 38 Blues Plans - serves 100 million people. One in every three Americans carries a Blue Cross and Blue Shield member card in his or her wallet. More than threequarters of Fortune 100 companies and half of all Fortune 500 companies offer Blue Cross and Blue Shield coverage to their employees. Prior to using Daptiv PPM, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City utilized Microsoft Project for schedules, along with a shuffle of papers and Excel spreadsheets. The company needed an automated, collaborative way to manage projects and in Fall of 2006, began looking to implement a Project Portfolio Management tool. “The old way of managing projects and business processes was too much work – it was incredibly time-consuming and inefficient,” says Tammy Ault, Sr. Project Manager. “Not everyone had access to projects and people started duplicating information and there was redundancy.” With Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City’s IT department working on 75- 80 active projects, such as assessment, compliance and infrastructure projects, it was important from a resource management perspective to automate as much as possible and steer away from manual, resource-intense processes. “We needed to develop an assessment process within IT to determine weaknesses and areas for improvement, including resource allocation,” says Ault.

Solution

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City chose Daptiv PPM as a way to automate work flow and increase the overall visibility into their business processes. “We use Daptiv’s dynamic applications to track project risk, feedback, sign offs and change management – such as changes in scope of work or changes due to external events,” says Barb Shepard, Director of the PM Office.

With Daptiv PPM, the company is now able to assess the processes within IT to pinpoint weaknesses and other areas of improvement. “We use Daptiv to plan large initiative investment projects. For example, we planned for new insurance products, such as HIPAA compliance, using Daptiv dynamic applications, capacity planner, reports, project plans and documents.” Team members, project managers, resource managers and executives all use Daptiv to increase visibility into business processes. Project forms are created online so data syncs with the budget, allowing the company to modify resource requirements that are needed to executive initiatives.

In addition to the IT department, the finance department also uses Daptiv PPM to assign lines of business to each project and reallocate that time back to the lines of business, avoiding a multi-step, drawn-out process. About 100 other business people within Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City also utilize Daptiv PPM to manage their business processes, such as project updates and reviews.

Value On Demand

Implementing Daptiv’s Software as a Service (SaaS) Project Porftolio Management made the most sense for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City because their IT resources can be shifted from application maintenance into more critical projects. “Because Daptiv is a hosted solution, it cuts out the technical expense tied to administrators and support personnel in-house,” says Ault. “We like the fact that we don’t have to bring on the additional staff to work on technical issues or infrastructure maintenance, and our current staff can work more productively on their projects.”

With Daptiv PPM, there is visibility into projects and resources that didn’t exist before. “Being able to see resource allocation has impacted the company in a significant way,” says Shepard. “Before, resource allocation was limited to resource managers – now, from a PMO perspective, we can see allocations to understand how estimates pan out for planning and forecasting.” Gaining insight into different projects and activities is simple, allowing for increased communication and productivity. “We use custom dynamic applications for requests and sign offs – which takes about five minutes to create and we can measure risk, feedback, external events, deliverables and project changes. This enables us to manage resources and plan for upcoming initiatives seamlessly,” says Shepard.

An added value that Daptiv brings to the table, according to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, is the level of product innovation and responsiveness to clients. “We relay product suggestions to Daptiv’s support team and engineers and we see the impact of those suggestions in a short amount of time, which boosts our return on investment,” says Ault. “They are very responsive.”