Strong and sensitive planning brings in the project on time and under budget
FINEOS Corporation, a market leading provider of core software solutions for the global Life, Accident and Health Insurance industry, announced today that its customer, Alberta Schools Employee Benefit Plan, has successfully implemented the FINEOS Payment Component Solution. The Alberta School Employee Benefit Plan, ASEBP, is a Health and Welfare Trust operating in Alberta, Canada. A long standing FINEOS customer for over ten years, ASEBP has been using FINEOS Claims for their employee benefit plan and also for Master Data and Customer Management to give a Single View of members. They chose FINEOS for the Payments after paying visits to both Manitoba Public Insurance, (MPI), and Manitoba Teachers’ Society, (MTS), to see their implementations of the FINEOS Payments system.
ASEBP faced a risk with their reliance on an outdated mission-critical service that handled disability payments to their members and fed into the premium and reserve setting for the benefit plan. It was essential to replace this system with a reliable and modern payments component that integrated easily with their overall claims operation.
The Solution: The FINEOS Payments component can be implemented stand-alone or as part of the FINEOS Product Suite. It provides a comprehensive, configurable process for handling payments of all types, including processing everything from simple one-off payments to complex, long-tail payments that change over time. It has automated procedures for dealing with over-payments and under-payments and generates detailed audit trails of all financial movements. FINEOS Payments simplifies complex processes typically supported by multiple technologies, spreadsheets and desktop calculations bringing accuracy, reliability and speed. Its configurable calculations may be controlled centrally ensuring that new processes and limits are easily rolled out and automatically used in all cases.
The Approach: ASEBP and FINEOS agreed that stringent project management was paramount to the success of the project and understood that both parties’ philosophies regarding overall project methodology would require accommodation. These were successfully melded and a suitable hybrid approach was adopted to meet everyone’s needs. Timelines and related milestones were identified and reported on weekly; subject matter experts were on-boarded, budgets were set, reporting and change request frameworks were laid out and the project began on July 4, 2013 with a delivery date set for June 1, 2014.
The Result: The FINEOS Solution went live on June 1 2014 – on time and under budget even though the project accommodated change requests. Accuracy of the FINEOS Payments component was confirmed with parallel running on the old system which showed a 100% success.
According to Jennifer Carson, Executive Director ASEBP, “We have realized gains in process management almost immediately. It is our firm belief that our organization and our members whom we serve will benefit greatly from the move to the FINEOS solution. We have every confidence that this will serve us successfully for many years to come. This project has enabled us to solidify relationships with both internal and external ASEBP resources and importantly with the FINEOS team with each having very strong mutual respect and appreciation for each member’s contribution”.
Commenting on the successful upgrade, Michael Kelly, CEO, FINEOS Corporation said, “We are delighted that ASEBP chose FINEOS to replace their payments system. This confirms to us that our approach of working closely with our customers and integrating FINEOS staff sensitively with the customers’ teams brings dividends for us all. We are pleased that ASEBP is now planning to capitalize on the momentum of this implementation and continue working with the current resources from both organizations to capitalise on the latest version of FINEOS – Release 8.0. This will enable them to take advantage of all of the R&D investment which goes into our products. We are delighted that so many of our customers are now on the latest versions of FINEOS. In today’s fast moving competitive landscape software products must offer users full business functionality, business content as well as the configurability and flexibility to enable speed and agility to support the changing needs of the business.”
