The Regence Group Unites Its Four-State Sales Force on a Common Microsoft Platform Using

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The Regence Group Unites Its Four-State Sales Force on a Common Microsoft Platform Using the Onyx Employee Portal

Published: February 21, 2003

The Regence Group wanted to move from four disparate paper-driven systems to a single sales management information system that could accommodate differences based on local needs and legislative requirements. They implemented the Web-based Onyx Employee Portal built on Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 which provides a single platform for managing the sales process for group accounts.

Challenge: Find Common Ground for the Four-State Regence Sales Team

Headlines crowd the business pages of our daily papers announcing corporate mergers, acquisitions, and other affiliations. Once made, however, the organizations must wrestle with the issues of reconciling diverse corporate cultures and business practices. This has been one of the challenges for The Regence Group.

Founded in 1995, The Regence Group comprises four affiliates: Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon, Regence BlueShield in Washington, Regence BlueShield of Idaho, and Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah. As the names imply, each offers unique plans (with its own business processes) designed to meet local member needs and legislative requirements.

Today, The Regence Group, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, is one of the largest non-profit health care insurers in the United States with more than $5.7 billion in annual revenues. Its 6,700 employees serve more than three million members, 23,000 health care providers, and 5,000 agents and brokers across the four states.

Increasing volatility in the health care system in recent years has also fueled the need for common business processes. Government regulation, changes in financing and accountability, and the emergence of new medical and e-commerce technologies have contributed to narrower operating margins, higher customer expectations, and a growing financial uncertainty.

The Regence Group wanted to improve its management of group sales by consolidating four independent systems—a combination of paper and disparate technologies—into one online system. This would allow sales and marketing teams across the company to track, manage, and report on group sales. The new system would also be used to improve service levels to help retain groups with good risk profiles. And with over 90 percent of its sales generated by independent agents and brokers, the company was also looking for a sales management information system that would help identify those who produced the most cost-effective business.

However, while The Regence Group is committed to achieving the efficiencies of a large organization, it also needed a solution flexible enough to support the needs and requirements of local plans. Within Regence, some functions such as IT have been completely consolidated into one organization-wide unit. Others, such as Medical Management, are more loosely coupled and still operate fairly independently. “We may be one company,” said Scott DeNies, Manager of InterPlan Market Strategy, “but we must still support four unique markets, each with its own regulatory environment and customer demands.”

Solution: The Onyx Portal Provides a Single Sales Management Information System for All Regence Affiliates

The search for a solution took nearly nine months and involved employees from across The Regence Group—sales, marketing, underwriting, member services, and IT business unit managers. “We looked at how we market and sell our products and how we act as a company from our customers’ point of view, and asked ourselves how we could improve. That’s when we began to realize that we needed a system that would help us change our way of doing business,” says DeNies.

The recommended long-term solution was to put a single customer relationship management (CRM) system in place across all four affiliates, starting with a sales management application to track, manage, and report on group sales leads. This would position the company to establish an e-commerce infrastructure for future marketing and sales efforts.

Finding the Right Partner: Onyx Has a Passion for Flexible and Cost-effective Solutions

The vendor review involved an investigation of ten companies and ended with a rigorous evaluation of two finalists. In the end, The Regence Group chose Onyx. “Ultimately,” remarks DeNies, “we felt that Onyx was the best fit for our organization from the business as well as the technical perspective. We were very impressed with the accommodating way in which Onyx did business.”

Shirley Dunphy, a Regence Technology Architect and member of the review panel, remembers, “We needed a solution that was flexible enough to accommodate our evolving organization. We weren’t ready for the full out-of-the-box CRM solution that the other finalist offered. It simply did not make good business sense to extend so far beyond our business vision.”

Onyx was also the clear choice because its solution is based on Microsoft® technologies rather than proprietary tools. “Although we are an Oracle shop, we welcomed Microsoft technology over that of the other finalist in part because of the ready availability and accessibility of Microsoft tools,” says Van Crozier, Regence supervisor of IT staff who support marketing applications. “That put us in control of our solution, rather than being locked in by proprietary tools and forever dependent on the company that created them.”

Onyx worked with The Regence Group to develop a phased approach to the CRM solution. The first of three phases (and the only part implemented to date) focused on developing the Portal for internal staff—sales, marketing, underwriting, enrollment, and member services. The Onyx Employee Portal was configured to represent a common, high-level sales process that would allow sales and marketing teams across the company to track group prospects from the initial sales contact through the setup of those groups in the back-end systems.

The Right Technology: Microsoft Technologies Contribute to Fast and Cost-effective Implementation

Once the design phase was complete, Onyx built and deployed the sales management information system in about 20 weeks (versus an industry average of ten months), and at about one fifth of the cost of most industry solutions, evidenced in part by a highly favorable software-to-services ratio of 1:1.

Bryan Smoltz, Director of Project Management at Onyx, gives Microsoft technologies high marks for making it possible for Onyx developers to “leverage the services and raw performance of the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 platform—and the entire Microsoft technology stack—so we can focus on building CRM capabilities with business value rather than spending our time developing low-level services.”

The Onyx Employee Portal runs on all three versions of Windows 2000 including the Datacenter Server for high-end enterprise environments, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, and Com+ Services, in addition to Internet Information Server 2000 as the Web server. According to Smoltz, “Datacenter Server has a number of features, including support for up to 32 processors and 32 gigabytes (GB) of physical memory, that make it a strong competitor to other very large servers on the market, particularly UNIX.” Although Regence does not yet need to draw upon the power of Datacenter Server, the portal is positioned to scale as the business grows and the CRM deployments expand.

Onyx also depends on Windows 2000 Com+ services such as object brokering and thread pooling to help ensure that high volumes of simultaneous requests are handled as efficiently as possible. In addition, Onyx has taken advantage of Windows 2000 for performance monitoring and error handling, enabling administrators to monitor the Onyx application through operating system tools.

Rolling out the Onyx Employee Portal

The Onyx team trained about 30 Regence trainers to use the Onyx Employee Portal, who in turn trained nearly 800 Regence employees. Employees enter group leads into the system and move them through the stages in the sales process based on key events. For example, a group automatically moves from a lead to a prospect when it enters the proposal stages. Once a group becomes a customer, the system automatically sets up renewal opportunities for the following year. This allows sales staff to scan the system periodically for upcoming renewals and manage those accounts.

DeNies says, “Before Onyx, that kind of activity was extremely cumbersome. Now we have the potential to track opportunities throughout the sales cycle.” Regence also anticipates that the Portal will be useful for measuring and tracking broker performance, but reports need further definition and development to make that happen.

However, The Regence Group underestimated the process change the Onyx Employee Portal would introduce. After a year of using the system, notes DeNies, “We now recognize the need to further redesign our business processes to support the use of the CRM system. We must also complete the integration of Onyx with appropriate back-end systems for rating, proposals and membership loading. Until that is complete, we won’t be able to reap the full benefits of the portal.”

With Phase 1 complete, The Regence Group looks forward to putting a full-fledged CRM system in place over the next several years. Phase 2 will extend Web-based access to the company’s broker community, and Phase 3 will involve creating a full CRM capability—completing integration with back-end systems currently under way and with other e-commerce applications.

Benefits: High Speed to Value for a Centralized Sales Management Information System

The Regence Group was pleased with the highly favorable services to software ratio of less than 1:1 with consulting fees running about 60% of the software license costs, rather than the more common ratio for enterprise application deployment of anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1. The use of the entire Windows 2000 technology stack and its services contributes to this high speed to value. As Smoltz puts it, “We were able to deliver a solution on time and under budget in part because we’ve built our portal applications from the ground up on a single integrated platform from Microsoft. The elegance of Microsoft technologies made it possible for Onyx to deliver an application that could be customized to meet Regence requirements and be easily integrated with their legacy systems.”

The Onyx Employee Portal has given The Regence Group new tools to continue to integrate the sales process across the four states in which the company operates. It creates shared access to information for the sales teams while giving each affiliate the necessary independence. Regence Group employees use the Onyx system to track new group prospects and renewals through the sales cycle and to improve the management of groups. While the system captures information that can be used to segment customers, prospects, and renewals for targeted marketing campaigns, the company has not begun to use this capability.

Finally, the Onyx Employee Portal is helping The Regence Group develop an infrastructure that will serve as the future foundation for the development of other ebusiness capabilities.