Background

Crawford & Company is a provider of claims management solutions to insurance companies and self-insured entities, with a global network of more than 700 locations in 63 countries. The Crawford System of Claims Solutions offers integrated claims services, business process outsourcing, and consulting services for product lines, including property and casualty claims management, warranty inspection, workers’ compensation claims and medical management, and legal settlement administration.

Challenge

Crawford is required by law and their own policies to train their employees regularly in the relevant areas required for their job profiles. This compliance training curriculum helps employees stay up to date with laws and regulations the company must follow in its operations. There are several rules that apply to this training scenario, such as the job profile of the employee, their location, their department, the period of employment, and previous training, among others.

Every three months, Crawford is required to go through the database of almost 10,000 employees, review their employment longevity, location, position, training history, etc. to determine which course/training material needs to be assigned. Initially, a spreadsheet was created manually by Crawford’s training department, but with thousands of employees in each distribution, they were finding it impossible to create the needed data on time, as each employee had to be cross-checked against the multiple rule sets. Crawford approached WBPRO to develop an application that could allow them to automate the distribution process.

Solution

WBPRO conducted a study with the current business logic of requirements to identify how the process was currently handled. WBPRO’s engineers discussed their understanding of the system with Crawford’s compliance training department to ensure the requirements were clearly understood. During this phase, WBPRO’s IT team took into consideration the modern trends in the industry and designed the application.

WBPRO suggested creating an automated system that would receive input from the user directly via an input file, and use that input file in conjunction with the predefined rules to create the distribution files. The process includes:

• Review of the integrity of the employee population data to ensure all data has been imported with the correct format, identification of conflicts, and elimination of duplicates.
• Creation of compliance rules per the country, state, city, department, position, hire date, training term, and training history.

Benefits

The most important client benefit is saving time creating a distribution. Previously, the compliance department manually processed the distributions for all employees, and it was difficult to deliver on time. This required a huge amount of manpower during the time in which a distribution needed to be created. At times, the responsibility was moved to different departments and then later coordinated to create a single distribution file.

With the new application, the time to create a distribution decreased from weeks to less than an hour. Since the system has inbuilt error-checking, its guarantee in the final distribution file was correct without needing to cross check.

This reduces the liability of the company, ensuring employees comply with government and company policies.