National Benefit Services (NBS) is an outsourced employee benefits provider serving over 20,000 employers across the retirement and consumer-driven healthcare markets. With over 6,000 plans available nationwide, NBS provides top-notch benefit plans to companies of all sizes. The company has experienced steady growth and needed to find a way to scale operations efficiently, enhance accuracy and provide customized service to clients. To help execute these goals, NBS implemented SS&C | Blue Prism® Chorus Business Process Management (BPM) more than a decade ago.

Scaling Operations Without Hiring Additional Staff

As an intermediary working with various third parties like brokers, advisors and investment providers, NBS has experienced substantial year-over-year growth of 20% for over a decade. However, maintaining such growth with a relatively flat headcount proved challenging without the right technology. The company needed a way to scale its operations without being required to hire and train a large group of new employees.

Chorus BPM Enables a Competitive Advantage

NBS implemented Chorus 14 years ago to help address these challenges. With process automation, NBS can deliver on client expectations sustainably even with exponential growth. Additionally, the technology has helped transform NBS's operations and provide a competitive edge. Last year alone, NBS onboarded over 1,200 new plans — something competitors struggle to match. By leveraging Chorus to streamline and automate processes, NBS can deliver customized solutions and operate efficiently with less staff. Adopting Chorus has given NBS employees a productivity boost and enabled them to perform more meaningful work. And NBS’ clients have benefited from customized and flexible solutions designed to meet their specific needs, high-quality service levels and quick response times.

End-to-End Process Orchestration

Like many organizations, NBS’ business is complex with many non-linear workflows and highly specialized work — all of which must function flawlessly across a huge client and partner network. Chorus has become the de facto tool to distribute work across the business and support employee’s interactions with clients and their data. Chorus is well suited to knowledge workers who execute these non-linear, complex processes. It gives them all the information that they need when they need it — and it gives them the flexibility to work through the process in the most efficient way possible. They’re not forced to go from A to Z. Depending on the interaction and what the client’s needs are, they can go from A to D to M to C, and whatever's needed. In the end, still making sure that A to Z gets accomplished.

Automating the Mailroom

In addition to enabling NBS to work differently across the whole enterprise, they’ve also been able to go deep into specific areas. NBS, like so many organizations, receives hundreds of thousands of emails, documents and even faxes every year. Each item requires someone to understand the context, classify the work required, determine where the work needs to get done and then route that work to the right place. They use tools like SS&C | Blue Prism® Document Automation, an intelligent document and email processing tool, to automate this work with phenomenal results, achieving 99%+ accuracy, levels that are even better than humans can achieve. Because of technologies like these, NBS has been able to onboard six times more plans in one year than the total number many of their competitors have on their books.

What's Next for NBS?

Next up for NBS is to enable their partners and clients to interact with the workflow directly. Rather than having to do a lot of back and forth through email or other communication channels, NBS wants to serve a digital form directly to the client for completion. Then NBS will be able to determine immediately if everything is 100% complete and accurate without the back and forth they experience today. And because the work is already in the system, it doesn’t have to be manually sent in. This will improve the quality of service and accelerate the speed to completion.