Automating High Volume Processes for the Long Haul

A huge challenge faced the US Department of Veterans Affairs following the passage of a government bill which expanded the educational benefits of military veterans who have served since September 11, 2001. Veterans submitted millions of claims over a gradual period of time and the department's processes and systems could not keep pace. The result was a massive backlog. As recently as October of 2012, the total number of unprocessed claims had not dipped below 100,000 since July of 2011.

The department employed the philosophies of Lean, Six Sigma and Business Process Management (BPM) in order to develop a new process and automation solution to help eliminate it overwhelming claims backlog. The project they undertook added 74 man years of claims processing capacity in the first six months following the deployment of a large-scale technology solution and this number continues to grow as the system is "tuned" over time.

In this whitepaper, find out how the Department of Veteran Affairs tackled the backlog problem and look at how Lean, Six Sigma and BPM methodologies were leveraged within the process automation solution.