• Client: Principal Financial Group®

• Business Area: Group Proposal Services

• Opportunity: Streamline the work to produce a quote for Specialty Benefits and
   Health products; align team structure and goals with new processes; and
   reorganize the department for optimal performance

• Results:
   - Removed three handoffs from the process, going from four people touching a
     quote to single-touch processing
   - Process changes improved labor efficiency by 17%
   - Performance management, data feedback, and collaborative norms to allow associates to
     control their own workflow resulted in additional gain of 21% labor efficiency
   - Reduced staffing by 27 FTEs ($1.2 million annually)

• Client: A large financial services company

• Business Area: New Marketer Setup (Contracting)

• Opportunity:Marketer Setup is the first experience a new marketer has with the
   company — the process operated with a 15-day setup cycle time, frustrating new
   marketers and the distribution team by delaying new case submission

• Findings:
   - Substantial numbers of setup requests came in incomplete
   - Team was attempting multiple follow-ups on incomplete requests rather than
    processing in-good-order requests quickly

• Results:
   - Streamlined process to remove 3 handoffs and reprioritize work
   - Reduced cycle time to within 2 days for every complete submission
   - Reduced setup and follow-up labor by $500,000 annually
   - Setup speed became a competitive advantage!

• Client: A large financial services company

• Business Area: Life insurance administration

• Opportunity: Streamline execution for customer transactions for existing
   individual life coverage

• Findings: Processed approximately 2,000 transactions per day;
   61 associates were engaged in this process

• Results:
   - Reduced work-time to track the less-complex 50% of the transactions
     by 2 minutes each by doing same-day processing (which also improved
     overall cycle time)
   - Eliminated handoffs and non-value added work in complex transactions
     (tax impacts and customer high-touch)
   - Reduced staffing by 6 FTEs ($250,000 annually)

• Client: A large financial services company

• Business Area: Disability insurance claims

• Opportunity: Streamline execution of disability claims transactions without
   adverse claims impact (losses)

• Findings: Lean analysis found excess handoffs and non-value-added work
   (including some of the 100% quality reviews which were actually creating
   more risk of error); excess handoffs also drove higher cycle time

• Results:
   - Reduced work time and cycle time for the claim data entry process,
     reducing staffing by 5 FTE ($250,000/yr)
   - Improved cycle time for data entry from 5 days to 1 day, allowing claim
     examiners more time to make a decision before the legal deadline of
     14 days
   - Reduced reviewer staffing by 2 FTE ($100,000/yr)

• Client: A large utility company

• Business Area: Corporate Finance and Accounting

• Opportunity: Streamline the work time to create and explain various monthly
   reports

• Findings: Discovered that the finance and accounting teams were not aligned
   in their requirements, and those requirements were not supported by the
   “customers” of the data (executives)
• Results:
   - Created a matrix of reports, requirements, and relationships of the
     various sources of data
   - Determined the critical path of reporting information gathering
   - Moved other actions “in parallel” to the critical path
   - Set “cutoff criteria” for explanation of variances
   - Delivered more useful reports — hard to measure, but “They knew it
     when they saw it!”