Sometimes, brute force gets a job done. Sometimes, a little finesse is all it takes. Other times, you need to combine the two to accomplish your goal!
To see how these concepts played out in our project for this client, please visit Applying Technology to Reduce Unbilled Time.
This month's case study focuses on a client needing to make some big improvements in its inventory of items to be rebilled – and fast! Their answer was a brute force approach – pulling the regular Billing staff off their normal tasks to research and resolve rebills, and hiring temps to backfill the Billing positions and handle the day-to-day tasks.
Once work started, though, management saw that merely throwing more people at the problem would be insufficient to meet year-end targets. Yes, they needed more people to work the backlog – and they needed their staff to be more efficient and effective.
We worked with management to envision and implement quick technology hits to improve their peoples' productivity:
- By providing these technology hits, we improved staff efficiency – we reduced staff time for the research or rebill activities.
- By estimating the dollar impact each technology hit would have, and by ranking these so the biggest ones were implemented first, we improved staff effectiveness – we ensured staff did the right activities, and more of them.
Our ideas added an element of finesse to resolving these issues.
As you'll read in the case study, these force and finesse approaches complemented each other perfectly. Together, they yielded nearly a 40% reduction in the items awaiting rebilling, and quickly increased cash receipts.
Sincerely,
Todd L. Herman
