Going through a merger and acquisition (M&A) or significant business growth over a short period of time is challenging, with hurdles popping up to inhibit a smooth transition toward productivity. IT teams and other functional service teams play an important role in clearing those hurdles and accelerating the work required when dealing with large influxes of new employees and processes.
Ohio-based CareWorks Family of Companies (CareWorks) provides its more than 100,000 customers with a variety of services, including workers’ compensation medical management, risk management, absence management, third-party administration, compliance consulting and vocational rehabilitation. When CareWorks was acquired by York Risk Services Group (RSG) in early 2014, York RSG scaled CareWorks’ cloud service management platform through York RSG to support all service center operations, including all current acquisitions (six in 2014 alone) and future acquisitions.
Here are five key business areas in which service management helped streamline the infrastructure and process challenges of M&As for CareWorks.
Overcoming M&A Challenges
Click through for five ways service management can help organizations overcome merger and acquisition challenges, as identified by CareWorks.
Audit Automation
As a managed care company, CareWorks must follow significant audit requirements. On average, the company is required to run an audit once a day so it was imperative that the company create an efficient system. Using ServiceNow, CareWorks turned to an automated cloud audit process, which streamlined the system, increasing accuracy and efficiency. When CareWorks was acquired by York RSG, the decision was made to scale the automated audit service to the entire enterprise, resulting in substantial savings with no added resources.
IT Management
In an M&A situation, IT must reassess its infrastructure needs and capital, working to integrate disparate systems to eliminate redundancy and identify productivity gaps. By managing IT in the cloud, CareWorks was able to be strategic in coalescing existing infrastructure around business needs.
Human Resource Streamlining
To facilitate the assimilation of new employees, the CareWorks team streamlined employee onboarding and offboarding, which helped efficiently transfer employees between companies or departments. As a result, the company realized a 15 percent increase in employee productivity for onboarding and offboarding management, and a 30 percent increase in productivity for department transfer management.
Customer Service
Quickly transferring elements from one business to another is key to ramping up through an M&A. CareWorks was able to rapidly integrate a customer portal for call center applications, helping to eliminate repetitive call and documentation tracking within the call center. The team built a responsive mobile web application, which was adopted across the organization to transform the customer experience and be a support model used by the businesses.
Mobile Device Service Automation
Looking to better manage its BYOD function for all employees, CareWorks created a system to manage the inventory of phones distributed to employees and tapped a mobile device management (MDM) solution to remotely manage the devices. To streamline the support model, the IT team integrated the MDM solution into ServiceNow to allow all provisioning to be initiated by IT and automated for the end user. With automation, provisioning a phone now takes 30 seconds. Implementing this automated work flow platform created a more agile and efficient business with improved velocity.