THE CLIENT

One of the nation’s largest health insurance companies.

BACKGROUND

Our client has embarked on a program to improve their Product Lifecycle Management and to make the company’s product catalog available to sell digitally.  While the primary objective is to establish a single source of truth for product catalog information, they also want to reduce the dependency on significant manual tasks and to optimize their business processes leveraging the Pega platform.

The first phase consisted primarily of populating required data elements into Pega Product Composer System (PCS) to support the majority of their standard products. Rulesware was engaged to implement a second iteration, focused on expanding the product catalog solution to include mid-market standard plans and to improve the business processes surrounding their Product Lifecycle Management.

RULESWARE’S APPROACH

As with all of Rulesware’s engagements, we strive to bring the clients along on a Pega journey, rather than to “build it for them”.  This approach not only helps to train the client on the Pega platform, but also ensures that the solution being built is driven by their strategic vision.  Taking the time to focus on this alignment safeguards against the wrong requirements being developed, reducing the overall time to build the solution.

While expanding the product catalog to include mid-market products was a key requirement, introducing case management and business process management was critical to driving the efficiencies and transparency that were lacking in the manual processes.  Rulesware collaborated with the business to thoroughly evaluate their Product Development Lifecycle. By doing so, we were able to identify the most appropriate areas to introduce case management and opportunities to reduce data defects.

Midway through the project, due to changes on the business side, the timeline for the release was pulled in by 3 months.  Despite the revised timeline, the mid-market enablement and the business process improvements still needed to be delivered.

THE RESULTS

Through the effective use of the scrum methodology, partnership with the client,  and tight collaboration amongst the team, priorities were altered, changes were made and the team was able to deploy the second release of the client’s application three months early, under budget and with zero defects.  The two phases resulted in a 65% reduction in the time it takes to bring products to market.

The team attributes the faster, higher-quality results to a strong focus on alignment, methodology adherence and governance.  In the words of the client, this was “a testament to the dynamic and dedicated team we have the pleasure to work with every day.” This was music to our ears!

What’s more, the client noted that the release, “a truly collaborative effort,” marked a significant milestone for their platform, proving their ability to deliver on their business objectives and establishing the foundation from which to build their strategic transformation programs.