Celebrating 1 Million Hours Saved with Advance It

Matt Bruno is the founder and COO of ReSource Pro.

ReSource Pro’s engine for continuous improvement reaches milestone

At ReSource Pro, we’re process geeks. No stranger to lean processes, we love continuous improvement and innovating from the bottom up.

That’s why in 2014 we launched the Advance it! program, an internal initiative to promote innovation from employees at all levels. Advance it! incentivizes our teams to share new ideas for streamlining processes and bringing greater value to our insurance clients.

I firmly believe the best ideas come from the people working most closely on a task. Years after we started Advance it!, I heard about Amazon’s “Just Do It” awards, a similar program that recognizes team members for trying something creative, something new.

Since its inception, Advance it! has produced 23,317 ideas, saving over 1 million hours in processing time. To celebrate this milestone, we want to share some of the best ideas the program has generated.

One of the most impactful employee-led innovations saves 155 hours every month on insurance claims handling. Previously, the process was 12 steps long and included tasks such as downloading the policy, setting up claims, and generating emails. A single claim could take up to 48 minutes to complete.

To cut down on time, the ReSource Pro team worked out a solution to automate the entire process. Now, save for a few steps in the beginning and exceptions, bots automatically extract data from an Excel sheet and complete a majority of the process on their own. By integrating automation, the average processing time dropped by 10 minutes, and over the month that adds up to 155 hours. What’s more, this innovation also reduces training time and helped our teams gain a better understanding of how to apply automation to other time-consuming tasks.

Among the thousands of innovations we’ve collected with this program, a few stand out for creativity. One ReSource Pro team working on processing employee benefits requests sought to improve their efficiency by changing the behavior of account managers through processes.

Over time, the team had noticed that email requests from certain account managers often lacked important source materials or contained ambiguous instructions. Contacting the account managers to clarify took time away from processing.

The team created a standardized request form, summarizing all the critical information in the request, and proposed this idea to the client. The client was so pleased that they immediately shared it with all the account managers. The form saved the team 6.7 hours per month while also demonstrating the solution-driven thinking that we foster at ReSource Pro.

In the first year of the program, ReSource Pro received an unusual certificates request from one client. They wanted 20,000 certificates for all the doctors and nurses at a hospital—and they wanted them within 12 hours.

The team estimated that this would take four people to complete within the deadline. But one client analyst stepped up and applied a DOS command that allowed him to complete the task ahead of schedule and all on his own. This clever move won him the Advance it! Best Innovation Award, and set the bar high for innovators who would follow.