The company then made 60 copies of the enrollment paperwork, filing it within 11 departments at Empire. Even then, fully 67 percent of the forms had to be returned or double-checked by phone with the brokers because of errors or omissions.

Since they couldn’t generate quotes themselves or process the paperwork, the brokers were completely dependent on Empire’s broker relations staff, who were around only during normal business hours. As a result, it took about 27 days to shepherd a new customer through the sales and enrollment process. Then employees had to wait another week to 10 days to get their ID cards. "Most clients look immediately for the ID cards," says Vazoulas. "If they’re delayed, the clients don’t feel secure because they don’t know if their health plan is in effect."

The Quest to Streamline

In late 1998, Stephen Bell, vice president of e-business operations, and Kenneth O. Klepper, senior vice president of systems, technology and infrastructure, began developing a "print on demand" system to reduce the vast mountains of quickly outdated benefits brochures and contracts that sat in storage rooms. In the process of working out the details, Bell and Klepper got a glimpse of how inefficient the sales and enrollment process really was. In April 1999, Empire brought in David B. Snow Jr. as COO. With a list of core business practices in hand, he zeroed in on sales and enrollment as an area ripe for change. "It was labor-intensive, slow and cumbersome," say Snow, who now serves as both president and COO.

First, Snow and his team took a hard look at the existing paper-based process. They took over a conference room and created a color-coded map of the sales process; no one had ever before tracked it from start to finish. "It was like a grapevine," Bell says of the process map. "It just got bigger and bigger. For the first time, we realized that there were 33 redundancy audit checks?where we go over information to make sure it’s correct?built into the process. We had created this nightmare."

They began by eliminating all the loops and unnecessary steps, such as the need for brokers to keep calling the company for revised quotes. "Wherever there were repeats, we tried to eliminate them," Bell says. The team managed to cut the essential steps from 80 to 40. That was the easy part, he says; then came the daunting task of finding an application to make the streamlined map a reality.