Adaptive Case Management

2012 Awards Program

2012 Winners Announced in Global Awards for Excellence in Adaptive Case Management

June 6, 2012—Boston, Mass. The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) announced today at ACM Live the winners of the 2012 Global Awards for Excellence in Adaptive Case Management. Co-sponsored by WfMC and KMWorld, these prestigious awards recognize user organizations worldwide that have demonstrably excelled in implementing innovative ACM solutions.

Last year WfMC inaugurated a new Global Awards program for Adaptive Case Management (ACM) case studies to recognize and focus upon ACM use cases. Adaptive Case Management, also known as Dynamic or Advanced Case Management, represents a radical new approach to supporting knowledge workers in today's leading edge organizations. ACM provides secure, social collaboration to create and adapt goal-oriented activities that enable informed decision-making using federated business data and content.

Finalists and winners were selected by a panel of 16 judges drawn from experts in this field, headed by an Advisory Panel comprising Tom Koulopoulos, Delphi Group, Hugh McKellar, KMWorld and Connie Moore, Forrester Research.

“These winners showcase adaptive case management at its very best, and I believe, raise the bar for all BPM software vendors, “says Connie Moore, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. “Why? Because these companies have automated complex, customer-facing processes that take the drudgery and inefficiency out of work while providing an unprecedented automation level for business flexibility, compliance and transparency. These solutions are not BPMS as usual; they integrate the best of both worlds—human decision-making and automation—empowering the workforce to apply human judgment to complex situations while also automating complex work flows between customers, partners, external parties and managing the interrelationships between high volumes of documents, data, collaboration artifacts and other information.”

Another judge noted the convergence of capabilities presented through ACM, combining distinct yet complementary technology streams.

“An old joke about knowledge management goes something like this: Ask five different analysts to define it and you’ll get seven different answers,” says Hugh McKellar, editor-in-chief of KMWorld. “Just as KM isn’t purely content or document management, Adaptive Case Management is not merely sophisticated workflow or robust and versatile business process management. I believe ACM, like KM, combines an organization's central nervous system and its circulatory system, as these winners clearly exemplify. All are to be commended for advancing both adaptive case management and knowledge management.”

The winning organizations, by category:

Category: Customer Facing -- Silver Winner

HSBC Bank nominated by Newgen Software Technologies Ltd
Operating in India in 1853, HSBC Bank has steadily grown in reach and service offerings, keeping pace with the evolving banking and financial needs of its customers. The bank automated its Customer Request Management process with more than 3000 users (Front Office and Back Office) using the Request Management Solution with various roles assigned to them. According to the request type, the RMS auto-disseminates tasks amongst those users. The Case Management solution for RMS supports request initiation from multiple channels and departments. Everyday 8000+ cases are raised on the RMS system. The system supports more than 470 case request types and enables addition of new request type or a new subcategory of request in the RMS system which becomes an integral part of the solution.

Category: Customer Facing -- Gold Winner

Generali Hellas Insurance Company S.A. nominated by EMC
Generali Hellas, one of the world's largest insurance and financial services companies (47 on the Global 500), has implemented case management for its core business processes, including insurance applications and claims. The system handles on-boarding of new policies, covering the full life-cycle from submission of electronic and paper forms, through underwriting, collection of supporting documentation, policy approval, and management reporting. Agents are the primary sales force for Generali Hellas, and an optimal agent relationship is mission critical to giving the company a competitive advantage and continued growth. The case management system achieves greater efficiency and rapid outcomes, with features such as Web, mobile, and email self service options, streamlined collaboration between the agents and Generali Hellas staff, and automated notifications triggered by process exceptions. As a result, the system has significantly raised service levels. Policies are now created in two days rather than 10 and achieved the goal of promoting customer satisfaction and agent loyalty.

Category: Healthcare -- Silver Winner

Vision Service Plan (VSP) nominated by OpenText Business Process Solutions
Vision Service Plan (VSP) provides high-quality, cost-effective eye care benefits and world-class products and services to eye care professionals, employers, and more than 56 million members. A management dashboard provides Supervisors and Management with visibility and access to active work. The use of the Customer Care Portal significantly improved customer service quality by simplifying the creation and processing of critical documents including claims adjustments, complaints, doctor inquiries and fraud alerts while providing over $700K in annual savings on business operations. The key users include Customer Service Representative knowledge workers who create the case and can add tasks that trigger collaboration with the Processor knowledge workers who receive the case and process the necessary activities on the case.

Category: Healthcare -- Gold Winner

Cognocare System for Oncology nominated by IActive US Corp
Cognocare System for Oncology interprets clinical guidelines and expert knowledge in order to automatically generate personalized treatment processes, adapted to each individual patient condition. Physicians use it as an assistant to design, follow-up, modify and update fully detailed treatment processes. This case study describes the use of ACM technology, implemented by means of an Artificial Intelligence Planner and Scheduler, to help physicians handle the process associated to the treatment of their patients. Cognocare brings a unified view and handling of oncology treatments, enabling a true dynamic and knowledge-based process generation adapted to patients and context, based on artificial-intelligence award-winning technology and driving  a measurable improvement of health care delivery such as Knowledge Sharing whereby physicians (knowledge workers) make similar decisions by sharing system's knowledge, in terms of both patient ontology extracted from clinical records and process templates to comply with standard clinical guidelines.

Category: Knowledge Worker Innovation
Judges Choice Award and Overall Winner.

UWV, Netherlands nominated by Perceptive Software
UWV, a Dutch organization delivering employee benefits to Dutch citizens, has been using process management systems since 2001. The system was completely renewed and upgraded to a new version early 2012 to improve the customer experience of a UWV customer that objects to an earlier decision of UWV. These objections are handled by the 1,250 employees of the Objections and Appeals division of UWV. According to the knowledge workers themselves, their new adaptive case management system offers them the possibility to live up to their customer’s expectations. UWV is an independent governing body that executes (state) employee insurances. UWV's objections process is a complex process with more than 300 possible process steps, multiple participants and strict legal rules that need to be followed. The case is routed between legal advisors, health professionals, administrators, medical advisors and employment advisors that are involved in making a decision leading to the resolution of the objection. Additionally, several parties like the objector, employers, or UWV may appeal the decision before an independent judge. This is a large implementation. On average annually more than 100,000 objections, 11,000 appeals and 2,900 higher appeals are registered at UWV and processed by 1,500 employees of the Objections and Appeals Division.

Category: Knowledge Worker Innovation -- Gold Winner

Paneon GmbH nominated by Adaptive GmbH
Paneon GmbH is a two-year old startup located in Austria and currently serving the German speaking markets of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. As a Network marketing business with a large, decentralized structure of individual sales partners providing contacts to customers, building sales and business relations from informal community relations Paneon faced a number of challenges. The solution consists of an ACM goal-oriented case management system for customer care and warehousing and logistics services, task-oriented collaboration derived from business objectives linked to goals. Two independent organizations have to be supported - one for the social interest, the other for business operations. A challenge consists in transiting users between roles: member-customer-partner-coach. Using the concepts behind Strategic ACM, Paneon was able to make the relationships between strategy, people, roles, authority, goals, tasks, customers, and means (formerly rigid budgets) transparent and understood.

Category: Public Sector -- Silver Winner

QSuper Superannuation Fund nominated by OpenText Business Process Solutions
QSuper is the superannuation fund (a retirement program in Australia) for current and former Queensland government and related entity workers. As one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds and more than 600 employees, QSuper manages more than $30 billion in funds for over 540,000 members and is committed to working with our members so they can feel more confident they are making the best choices for their situation. QSuper’s use of case management companywide has resulted in significant benefits and ROI in terms of cost reduction, increased efficiency, improved customer experience, decreased risk and business continuity planning. QSuper’s case management system, called workQ, handles 78% of business processes (140 out of 180). workQ is used across QSuper from the knowledge workers processing claims, to business operations and information technology staff, to mid and senior level management. Sixty percent of business operations staff currently use workQ (198 out of 338), with plans to roll out to 100%.

Category: Public Sector -- Gold Winner

Norwegian Food Safety Authority nominated by Computas AS
The Norwegian Food Safety Authority’s (NFSA) overall objective is to ensure safe food and animal welfare. NFSA's area of responsibility comprises plant health, food and fodder production and handling, water supply plants, cosmetics, animal health and welfare for production animals and pets. Since 2009, about 1000 of NFSA's knowledge workers (veterinarians, biologists, engineers, other professionals) use MATS actively as a decision support system for the main bulk of their professional work; to plan, conduct and register audits. The public (farmers, restaurants, food production plants, food shops, fish exporters, plants importers, butcheries, pet owners) use MATS to register, apply, and view their own case information, resulting in 150 000 communications per year. Each establishment or person, NFSA client, is viewed as a case, having a corresponding work folder in MATS. Each case is followed by NFSA over a possible time span of many years, subjected to both planned and event driven control activities (inspection, audit, sampling and document control). MATS provides focus on task support rather than workflow support.

Category: Public Sector -- Special Mention

New York State Office of Children and Family Services nominated by IBM
The Criminal History Review Unit (CHRU) of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) helps process Daycare and Foster Care applications by collecting and reviewing criminal history review data. The CHRU was experiencing increased workloads and mounting storage needs, and the processing of applications was manually-intensive and inefficient. The goal of the case management solution was to implement an automated workflow system to minimize the physical handling of the applications and streamline the overall business processes. The solution enables users -- Criminal History Raters, Criminal History Reporting staff, Criminal History Analysts, and Record Keepers – to securely and reliably expedite application processing while meeting legal requirements for processing background checks, enabling validation and audits. The case management platform provides an integrated system that supports processing, maintenance, and distribution of criminal history reviews so that state staff can respond accurately and efficiently. It also provides interoperability with the applications from other agencies and departments.

Honorary Category: Production Case Management

In addition, a special category was created to acknowledge an emerging subclass of ACM identified as “Production Case Management.” First described earlier this year by ACM pioneer Keith Swenson, three of the submissions were felt to be compelling examples of this emerging approach, yet did not otherwise illustrate the adaptive principles requisite to ACM. They are:

More details on case study requirements and the winners can be found online at www.adaptivecasemanagement.org. Finalists receive additional recognition by having their case studies published in the 2012 edition in the ACM Excellence Series by Future Strategies Inc., following the best-seller “Taming the Unpredictable” in 2011.

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and KMWorld jointly sponsor the annual Global Awards for Excellence in ACM. The Awards program is managed by Future Strategies Inc.

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Download 2012 Press Release PDF (6 pages 239kb)
Awards 2012 Live Streaming Presentation (36 minutes)
Awards 2012 Slides PDF (1.6mb)

FOR PRESS CONTACT:

Layna Fischer, Awards Director
Future Strategies Inc.
awards @ FutStrat.com
Tel: +1 954 782 3376
www.adaptivecasemanagement.org.