Milliman Case Study

Milliman is among the world's largest providers of actuarial and related products and services. Founded in 1947, Milliman is an independent firm with offices in major cities around the globe. Milliman has 2700 employees working in 60 offices, 12 of which are outside the US. The company generates $700 million in annual revenue.

Through consulting practices in employee benefits, healthcare, investment, life insurance and financial services, and property and casualty insurance, Milliman serves the full spectrum of business, financial, government, union, education, and nonprofit organizations. In addition to consulting actuaries, Milliman's body of professionals includes numerous other specialists, ranging from clinicians to economists.

As a financial consultancy, judicious handling of documents and proper storage of records is a key business requirement for Milliman.

At Milliman, businesses units are independent; but IT supports them all. This business fact makes it important for Milliman to standardize and automate the business processes; in order to maximize efficiency while reducing support overhead. Additionally, because ‘documents are the business’ at Milliman, creating an efficient document workflow that ensures documents are properly reviewed, stored, documented, and indexed for search is paramount to the success of the business.

As part of these processes, important documents need to be peer-reviewed according to a strict review process. At the end of this process, important documents need to be converted to records; after 60 days, the document trail is deleted but mandated metadata must be retained for auditing purposes.

Furthermore, because much of the business is carried out via email, it is important to efficiently save email messages for later retrieval. And individual consultants wanted the freedom to decide which emails were important to save. This has the added benefit of reducing the need to save gigabytes of needless messages, but it imposes requirements on the IT system selected to manage and store the email messages.

The search for a new solution to manage documents and records that fulfilled the Milliman business requirements was ‘fueled by desperation of a poor existing solution,’ according to Sid Segal, Dir of Corporate Applications at Milliman.

A selection process was initiated and 4 potential solutions were evaluated. At the end of this process, harmon.ie was selected, particularly because Milliman liked the email and metadata capabilities that harmon.ie provides.

“Our business depends on its ability to accurately and efficiently manage actuarial document workflow for clients...By making email and document storage in SharePoint part of the regular work routine, harmon.ie has been a boon for our highly-trained and experienced consultants who need to focus on their jobs and not on document management.”
- Sid Siegel, Director, Corporate Applications and Finance IT at Milliman, one of the world's largest providers of actuarial and related products and services

As a consultancy that works with many clients, it is important to retain client emails for audit purposes. In the past, these emails were kept in a single file location, but it was impossible to find email messages since they were not searchable and they were stored in a separate location from related documents from the same client.

Many types of consultants need to retain email messages. In fact, twenty practices with over 400 people including those that deal with life insurance, employee benefits, health care, and property/casualty insurance, need this email saving capability.

These consultants now save emails via ‘drag and drop’ into SharePoint using harmon.ie.. For the first time, email messages and related documents are all stored in the same place. Furthermore, now the email messages are searchable since email headers are automatically mapped to SharePoint columns.

harmon.ie was rolled out together with SharePoint, providing Milliman consultants with an intranet for the first time. As such, when storing documents and emails, consultants are generally not aware of SharePoint; they just see harmon.ie in their email window, which makes their daily workflow simple. The joint rollout has the additional benefit that users did not have to learn a new system; they just continued using email.

To introduce consultants to harmon.ie/SharePoint, Milliman ran monthly ‘Lunch and Learn’ sessions over Webex. They found that doing demos and answering questions while focusing on the business process (rather than the technology or products) provided the best method for gaining adoption.

Initially, harmon.ie and SharePoint were rolled out to twenty practices with over 400 consultants.

Looking forward, Milliman sees consultants extending the current use of harmon.ie/SharePoint to locate expertise within the organization. With valuable (and expensive) consultants located in many remote offices, the ability to quickly find the ‘right’ resource creates tremendous value to the company. To date, consultants have not created their SharePoint profiles yet, so searching it not yet possible, but this is planned.

Also, Milliman would like to extend the solution to add externally-facing SharePoint including contractors and partners into the collaboration ecosystem. A partner Active Directory already exists, so authenticating external partners will not incur an additional burden in rolling out the solution. This solution would extend all the benefits that harmon.ie provides today to the entire business, thereby saving valuable time and money, while ensuring that mandated business requirements are met, without having to change the typical users’ behavior.