Case management may be defined
differently across industries, but those
who rely upon it to service, retain and acquire customers know well that it is
a complex and critical component of customer care that can make or break your
business in a competitive environment.

Key
Case Management Scenarios

• Account opening/closing/changes
  


• Compensation processing
  


• Claims management
  


• Underwriting and contract management
  


• Campaign management
  


• HR/benefits administration
  


• Fraud investigation
  


• Service repairs

The central, common issue in case management is that all
too often, cases take too long to close due to any of number of internal
factors, including:

• Limitations of rigid corporate policies
  and processes
  


• Missing collaboration between
  knowledge workers and external experts
  


• Limited resources
  


• Misplaced information
  


• Lack of standardization
  


• Difficulty of enforcing compliance
  with policies, regulation and best practices
  


• Lack of visibility into key
  performance indicators

Experts agree that a
case is not simply a collection of isolated activities, processes and
documents, but a single and evolving entity progressing toward completion. Efficient business case
completion must be enabled with collaborative
processing for structured and
unstructured data that results in an integrated solution combining documents, data
extraction, business processes and rules, content management and customer
communications in a unified approach.

Business
and IT organizations in the enterprise have learned that successful execution
of case management requires the best of all worlds -- BPM for workflow,
productivity and accountability; ECM for collaboration, compliance and
communications; and CRM for customer history, service, satisfaction and
retention.

Beyond BPM

Defining and automating processes
is just part of the story in case management. Processing a typical claim
requires not only the management of various types of information -- audio and
video files, electronic forms, docu­ments and emails -- but also action and
approvals from multiple knowledge workers and experts in consecutive or
parallel processes to resolve the case.

In addition to standard processes and
activity that must always be completed, the adaptive (or dynamic) case
management we demand today involves ad-hoc, on-the-fly activity, events,
decisions and processes within and alongside those predictable parts of bringing
a case to resolution. But today's knowledge worker is often placed in a
straight jacket of policy and process restrictions that prevent successful (or
efficient) resolution of the case of the case within the boundaries of the
corporate rules.

State-
and event-based processing and business rules speed up the completion of the
business case by allowing and enabling ad-hoc elements and rules to be
addressed and incorporated into the progress of the case by enabling knowledge
workers to do what they do best with what they know best.

Rather than routing the case folder to the
next task sequentially down the line, a case must advance through both external
and internal events:

• 
  External events: Message content from
  a phone call, letter, fax or email is added to the case folder upon receipt,
  and new tasks or processes may be triggered or created.
  


• 
  Internal events: Assignments and
  business rules allow case workers assign tasks and initiate processes as well
  as to enable fully automatic creation, assignment or triggering of tasks based
  on external events, task completion or expiration of deadlines.

Single
Customer View

A holistic view of
all tasks and
business processes, including deadlines, documents, contracts and all related
communications, guarantees 24/7 real-time access to all pertinent informa­tion
for a case or claim. Represented by the case folder, the case as a whole is
easily understood through simple review of the unified and customized view that
summarizes the status and provides access to key content and details.

Two major
keys for success are 1) the optimization of rule-based processes and 2) the
integration of inbound and outbound business correspondence, electronically
connecting business partners while creating an efficient, holistic process.

Collaborative
business case management improves transparency, turnaround and efficiency by consolidating
all relevant information for internal administration, customer care and
external staff, analyzing data and improving processes collaboratively across
departments, functional levels and locations. Deadlines and strategic targets
can be incorporated into the workflow to ensure service-level requirements are
met on time and on budget.

Service
Quality and Efficiency

Effective case management results
in improved service quality and less process time for customers and partners. Using
process-enabled document capture technologies, for example, digitizes documents
to automatically extract, classify and index data for expedited processing,
analysis and search.

Automating
administrative processes and audits operations improves effectiveness in the
procedural flow by optimizing time and attention for those steps that only
human judgment or action can accomplish. Events or status changes can trigger
automatic alerts for immediate action when required, and dynamic task
assignment routes work to available staff according to roles, skills and
priority.

A truly effective case management solution
offers an integrated solution combining data, business processes and rules,
document creation, capture and output management with support for dynamic
business process management in a single platform.

Integrated Case Management: the
Requirements

• State-driven/event-based
  processing
  


• Centralized
  storage of inbound and outbound documents in a virtual case file
  


• Consolidated
  view of all procedures (activities, calendar, checklists)
  


• Distributed
  capture and classification of incoming complaints, requests or claims
  


• Rules-based
  optimization of business processes
  


• Ad-hoc
  process updates
  


• Integrated
  correspondence via browser or fat client
  


• Collaboration
  across departments, partners, agents and customers
  


• Output
  management from print to archive
  


• Easily
  definable GUI in multiple languages with automated web and desktop distribution
  


• Integrated
  sign-off, auditing, reporting and legal compliance
  


• Integrated
  user authorization and authentication, change management and versioning
  


• Seamless
  integration with business applications

Annemarie Pucher [annemarie.pucher@isis-papyrus.com]
is CEO of ISIS Papyrus Software, providing enterprise software for personalized customer
communications and process optimization business applications in the global
financial, insurance, utility, telecom, health care and public sectors.
Worldwide more than 2,000 enterprise customers use Papyrus standard software
for business applications to manage customer communications and billing, case
management, business correspondence, multichannel delivery, ADF, indexed
capture, TransPromo and archiving across systems and departments.