Syntrus Achmea Retirement Services

Improvement of integrated control for Retirement Services

Achmea Retirement Services — a division of Eureko, with 22.000 employees, one of the largest Financial Services Companies in the Benelux — has the goal to become the most important player in the collective pension market, by providing a full package of services for clients. Achmea therefore, like its competitors, wanted to reduce costs, increase back-office productivity, and improve front-office effectiveness including the support of multiple market labels. 

Furthermore, Achmea's pension obligations required balanced risk management. SAS 70 provides an objective and independent assessment of the quality of administrative organization and internal control and SAS 70 reporting provides insight into whether the necessary control measures exist to manage the identified risks of an organization at a particular moment in time (Type 1) or that is active during a certain period of time (Type 2).

“VisionWaves Delta helps us win new clients, by clearly demonstrating to them that we are in control of our internal processes and that we can easily extend this process governance towards them; this enables us to be a much more reliable partner”
Jan Blonk, Director Syntrus Achmea pensioenen
 

Challenge

Achmea's strategic goal was to evolve from an organization that manages independent events to an organization in control of processes, and finally to a high-performance organization, in which actions are value-driven based on internal competencies and agility, while guided through strategic insight and control.

From an operational perspective, several acquisitions caused Achmea to reorganize into a distributed organization of five subsidiaries. Each subsidiary had its own culture and management models. This resulted in a company that had difficulty responding to new customer requirements, that had a diversity of old systems and processes, and that had difficulty in adapting to changing law and policy.
Therefore, the company wanted its operational objectives to become more customer-service driven. It wanted to declare process management as the appropriate approach, to get more line people involved, and to build a transparent management model that links processes, products, customers, risks, and results.

Solution

Because the traditional Business Process Modeling approach failed to deliver insight to business process improvement opportunities, a Strategic Value Chain initiative was started based upon the VisionWaves  methodology. By connecting the value to the organization — values such as employee competency improvement, portfolio positioning and customer customization — to the described processes within Achmea, it became clear that most of the 700 processes overlapped or were duplicated, and that combined value was delivered by 175 processes — less than 25% of the previous whole. Looking more closely at this small number of processes which contributed the most value helped Achmea understand why some operational processes were not delivering. It became clear that the collaborative operational model aligning the front office (sales and marketing) and the back office (administrative workers) needed to be improved.  

In the past, the back office had seen the front office as promising customers everything, while the front office saw the back office as poorly organized. There were no clear key performance indicators or service-level agreements, and time registration was activity-based but not linked to any service/product combination.

Management reporting took an average of five days, and nobody was convinced of the accuracy of the reports. The business model, based on a value-chain approach, mapped the front-office/back-office alignment, made the interdependencies clear and pointed to the areas that really mattered in improving the business.

Benefits

VisionWaves delivered insight into the value created by services delivery and customers. Management has now improved the initial process model and installed a new performance management system. Questions can now be addressed regarding: which customer segments contribute the most value, how well the front office has been aligned with the back office, how people and resources are allocated to the appropriate business improvement initiatives, and which business processes are valuable?

As a result, Achmea increased its productivity by 40% and realized a 20 % cost reduction by implementation of new regulations. Furthermore management reporting (including process performance measurement and value measurement) is transparent and is delivered within two hours rather than the prior five days and reporting delivers direct output for the management team agenda and the Board.

By bringing together compliance management (SAS70), process management, performance management and risk models an integrated control of the retirement services has been fully accomplished. As a direct consequence of these improvements, new market opportunities have occurred and faster customer adoption has been realized. Strategically, the coordinated management model leads to measurable strategy execution and lays the groundwork for a high-performance organization.