Case Study: From Pain Points to Progress – Union Pension Fund Optimizes Operations

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A client in the union pension fund space offers various services including healthcare benefits, retirement and pension plans, disability and life insurance and advocacy support. The company faced challenges with its business systems – expressing a need for comprehensive and holistic general organizational process improvements. Withum was brought in to assist in identifying and optimizing improvement opportunities to reach future state goals through prioritized initiatives effectively.

Withum undertook a comprehensive operational diagnostic to pinpoint the root causes of the client’s business process pain points. This allowed Withum’s business and management consulting teams to offer change management solutions and optimize an efficient roadmap of prioritized initiatives. Withum’s thorough assessment of the client’s business processes aimed to standardize and define operations so the client could be confident in their business systems. Consulting engagement efforts culminated in opportunities for improvement deliverables with a central focus on prioritized initiatives and key actions that would deliver the most value to the client.

The company recognized the need for a comprehensive overhaul of its business processes, primarily due to challenges identified by Withum. These included:

These hurdles presented a significant operational transformation and improvement opportunity, which were further uncovered in a comprehensive operational assessment.

The Withum team identified several challenges that required a comprehensive approach to address. The challenges were not just related to the systems themselves but were indicative of broader issues in the operational model. The project aimed to align technology investments with strategic growth goals, which involved prioritizing initiatives amidst competing projects and goals.

With a complex systems architecture and high investment in more technology solutions, the client was becoming more inundated with half-complete workflows and complex workarounds that grew as the technology environment became more complicated.

The client suffered from execution challenges that significantly impacted the roll-out of organizational changes. They were in fire-fighting mode so much in the day-to-day that they were not tactically equipped to support the execution of strategies.

The client team recognized that addressing system challenges alone was insufficient and that an operational transformation required elevating people, optimizing processes and implementing data controls alongside technology changes. This holistic approach was necessary to maximize the organization’s yield and ensure investments were made in the right areas. Elevating people would include addressing low-hanging fruit, elevating roles and responsibilities to be more value-added across the organization and having leaders be
able to operate above the weeds.

In terms of low-hanging fruit, the client had multiple systems and sources of truth that they struggled to tie together. Instead of building an entirely new architecture up front, the optimal choice was to fix what we have today through training and minor process improvements. This would result in quick wins for the client team, increasing morale and client buy-in which is imperative for the project going forward. Given the heavy resistance to change in this organization, it’s important to note that quick wins are not a replacement for long-term solutions – they help to build momentum for longer-term initiatives.

These challenges highlight the complexity of the system modernization project, the need for a strategic, disciplined, accountable approach to drive value through the new system and the evolution of people’s roles and responsibilities in the organization. The project’s success depended on the collaborative efforts of the team to address these challenges effectively.

The engagement with this client consisted of a comprehensive operational diagnostic and concluded with an opportunity for improvement. Withum undertook a current-state strategic, tactical and operational process mapping review and an initiatives prioritization workshop to determine the ideal sequence of events for introducing organizational change. To support workshop initiatives, the Withum team also utilized surveys to perform general sentiment analysis and uncover pain points that may not have been freely shared in a workshop environment.

The operational assessment revealed critical themes and challenges that, once addressed, will significantly benefit the organization. These insights emerged from evaluating the company’s organizational structure, technological footprint, operational pain points and inefficiencies. With this knowledge, we aligned the company’s strategic vision with a streamlined process.

Withum discovered that the client suffered from people, process, technology and data themes that offered significant organizational improvement opportunities. To combat these issues, the Withum team created comprehensive opportunities for improvement along with a detailed roadmap for company success. The roadmap was phased first to stabilize, optimize and grow the operations’ efficiency and effectiveness. Change management was factored in to change the organization’s approach from a “big bang” model to one focused on quick wins and holistic solutions.

Additionally, a change management user adoption approach was vital to gaining more ownership and active participation, contributing to the growth path potential for functions and the organization. A hybrid waterfall and agile approach was adopted to address immediate challenges while laying the strategic groundwork for future changes.

Three overarching pillars were identified to achieve future state success:

Through a successful partnership between Withum and the client, a thorough assessment was conducted to evaluate the maturity of the company’s business systems and processes. This evaluation led to the formulation of valuable recommendations that, once put into action, promised to strengthen and enhance the company’s operations. The primary objective is establishing stability within the organization’s core activities and advancing its capabilities toward long-term financial planning, analysis and operational efficiency.

Over time, the company will automate manual and time-consuming tasks, leverage valuable insights from its data and pivot towards predictive and prescriptive analytics to contribute to its business planning and decision making processes. The roadmap to address this transformation is anchored in a strategic orientation incorporating quick wins to tackle immediate challenges. It also follows a phased project approach, designates change champions and establishes a robust project governance framework to ensure successful execution.