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1199 National Benefit and Pension Funds
Overview
The 1199 National Benefit and Pension Funds (NBPF) is a self-administered, self-insured, nonprofit, Taft-Hartley Welfare Trust Fund. Its purpose is to provide comprehensive benefits to active and retired members of 1199 collective bargaining units, along with their spouses and children. Contributions from employers, not union dues, pay the costs of providing benefits.
NBPF is one of the fastest growing organizations in New York. More than 150,000 members of NPBF work in voluntary hospitals, nursing homes, mental health clinics, and pharmacies, as well as in home care and social service agencies in the greater New York City area. Another group of NBPF participants has over 1,000 members who are eligible for a health care benefit package through Preferred Care, serving Rochester and the surrounding area. The 1199 Health Care Employees Pension Fund, with assets of over $5.8 billion, provides benefits to more than 30,000 retirees and their beneficiaries.
Challenge
The rapidly growing number of participants, combined with mergers between 1199 and other unions, created tremendous pressures on existing member services departments within NBPF. The departments were expected to incorporate and manage information on all the new participants, often with different benefit levels, and to do this with little or no operational staff increases. As a result, the NBPF pension department began experiencing problems typically associated with handling and managing a large volume of paper folders: new applications and member correspondence were being lost and misfiled at an alarming rate; the time needed to process routine member inquiries was increasing; and management had little or no data with which to track the flow of work or staff productivity.
Solution
1199 NBPF selected ImageWork Technologies to guide and assist them in the re-engineering of their Pension Department operations. The goal was to solve the out-of-control paperwork problem by placing the fund’s workflow under the control of business process management software, and replacing paper folders with electronic folders and digital images of member correspondence and other documents.
ImageWork staff performed a careful analysis of the current workflow and procedures; outlined data flow; plotted document sharing, routing, and storage requirements; processing rules; and technology infrastructure for the department. With a clear and detailed understanding of pension department needs, ImageWork and NBPF IT department representatives concluded that an integrated solution including Metastorm BPM™ -- would best satisfy their requirements.
NBPF deployed Metastorm BPM to automate and control the complex, multi-step processing of more than 5,000 monthly applications. Fast deployment, integration, and ease of use were the three key requirements during initial analysis. ImageWork leveraged the Metastorm BPM technology to build a solution that now allows hundreds of users to process applications, estimates, recalculation, and reconciliation online. With immediate access to all forms and information, users can add notes, sort, search, and store files electronically.
Results
Since deployment of Metastorm, NBPF management now has the data and quantitative measures to track how many member transactions and inquiries are processed in any given time frame and the staff response time needed for handling these transactions. With this information, management now is better able to match complex processing tasks with worker skills, and respond to member needs with greater customer satisfaction levels. Other benefits include:
- Immediate access to member folder documents
- Management tracking of member requests
- Segregated and auditable staff assignment lists
- Reduction in storage costs
- Reclaimed office space
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