Cutting claims cycle time by 41% at a regional insurer
A 90-year-old claims operation replaced its mainframe workflow without a single day of processing downtime.
- Cycle time reduction
- 41%
- Straight-through processing
- 4% → 31%
- Annual run cost removed
- $2.4m
- Delivered ahead of deadline
- 4 months
The challenge
North Meridian was processing 1.1 million claims a year on a mainframe workflow engine that only two people in the company understood. Average cycle time had drifted from 9 to 16 days over five years, straight-through processing sat at 4%, and the vendor had announced end-of-support with 26 months' notice. Two previous replacement attempts had been abandoned after a combined $14m of spend.
Our solution
Rather than a single cutover, we sequenced the migration by claim type — starting with the 38% of volume that was low-value and low-variance. We built a rules and workflow service alongside the mainframe, ran both in parallel with automated reconciliation on every claim, and migrated one claim type per fortnight. Process redesign ran ahead of each migration wave with the adjusters who would use it, and an adoption dashboard tracked workaround rates weekly.
The results
All claim types migrated in 19 months, four months inside the vendor deadline. Average cycle time fell from 16 to 9.4 days and straight-through processing rose from 4% to 31%. The mainframe was decommissioned, removing $2.4m of annual run cost. Twelve of North Meridian's own engineers were trained on the platform during delivery and now run it without external support.
Other engagements
- ManufacturingRecovering 6.2 points of gross margin across 14 plantsProcess mining across four ERPs found $31m of recoverable margin that plant-level reporting had been netting out.
- HealthcareAutomating prior authorisation for a 22-hospital health systemA document AI pipeline cut prior-authorisation turnaround from 4.5 days to under 6 hours, with clinician review preserved.
Could this be your programme?
We will tell you where the analogy holds and where it does not — before you spend anything.
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