In 2001, Assumption Life was struggling with low employee satisfaction related to training and development. Employees were unmotivated by the performance management system. The learning program offered at the time was not developing the skills needed for the company and its employees to excel.
The Human Resources (HR) Department oversaw a modest training budget of $20,000-$50,000 per year, and was not seeing much of a return on this investment. With few opportunities to learn, employees ultimately developed skills that they did not necessarily need for their job. keep reading…
Introduction: No decision maker sets policy in a vacuum. Rarely does a policy maker have a blank check with which to operate. Often, a decision is made within a complex environment where the number and type of options available are constrained by a multitude of factors. As Donald K. Hansen noted in the preface to the 10th edition of this casebook: “The decision maker at the national strategic level operates in a very complex environment where the constraints of international laws, rules, norms, and differing ideologies exist. If those elements are not difficult enough to contend with, the decision maker is further constrained by a deeply entrenched bureaucracy, influential personalities, the media, Congress, and his own cognitive limitations.
Understanding the Policy-Making Process: Few decisions can be more difficult for a U.S. president than to commit military forces to potential combat situations. The stakes in such decisions are always high. Loss of U.S. and other lives, the expenditure of vast amounts of resources, and damage to national prestige are among the possible negative outcomes of such decisions. Other decisions made at this level, such as the selection of a particular policy, commitment to procurement of certain military capabilities and weapons systems, and the signing of treaties, involve stakes that are almost as great as those involving the use of force. Keep reading…
Abstract: This study aims to probe into the analysis of online word-of-mouth in the insurance industry of Taiwan. By treating the top four insurance companies as key words, the researcher extracts users’ learning from blogs and online forums between January 1, 2010 and July 5, 2011. After eliminating improper samples, there are 914 valid articles. The research findings demonstrate that, the characteristics of online word-of-mouth in the insurance industry can be divided into a highly competitive brand zone and an independent brand zone.
Introduction: With the rapid growth of the national economy, service industries become critical in Taiwan, and the insurance industry blooms with the gradual increase of national incomes and the public’s recognition of personal physical and mental health. However, with the expansion of the insurance industry, in order to satisfy different customers, different types of insurance products become sophisticated and complicated, as diverse products allow the public to have multiple selections. Keep reading…
Introduction: The application development team at Länsförsäkringar AB, a Swedish insurance and banking company, wanted to simplify and speed software development. The team’s customers relied on it for specialized applications. However, the team was using manual development methods that slowed delivery.
Situation: Located in Stockholm, Sweden, Länsförsäkringar AB is owned by 24 regional insurance and banking companies. The Länsförsäkringar companies operate independently, and together they serve more than 3.2 million customers. The alliance has approximately 5,800 employees throughout Sweden and the United Kingdom. Although the regional firms manage most of their local IT infrastructure, they rely on Länsförsäkringar to design and administer line-of-business applications that are shared by the companies. Product specialists in Länsförsäkringar collect requirements and then work with the IT department—a team of approximately 300 employees—to create or revise software used for customer service and other mission-critical activities. Keep reading..
At PersonalFN, we recently faced a very interesting case of an individual who was 65 years of age, and had already retired and wanted to plan for cash flows for the rest of his life. Please note, he already had a financial plan created for him by another financial planning firm, and wanted us to create another financial plan for him so he could see how to proceed.
So, what was his main financial planning objective? – To invest his corpus of Rs1.50 crore, so as to meet his expenses of Rs 1 lakh per month (i.e. Rs. 12 lakh per annum) on an ongoing basis. Click here to read more…
Introduction: Mutual insurance companies write large proportions of insurance policies in many sectors. They have been very successful for several reasons. First, as Malinvaud (1973) points out, future markets provide only a remote idealization to the actual mechanism for risk allocation since the ideal market system is too costly to implement.
On the contrary, pooling individual risk by means of mutual insurance policies permits substantial economizing on market transactions. Another important reason for the success of mutual insurance is that they can solve through peer monitoring some moral hazard problems that plague incorporated insurance companies. Read more in Mutual Fire Insurance..
Central relies upon nearly 200 web applications. Many require users to enter large amounts of data into multi-step workflow processes, which Central’s systems then aggregate, exchange and return via an intricate web of scripts and forms. When users call Central to report site problems, it is often difficult—and time-consuming—for IT to recreate and identify where things went wrong within the process. Recognizing that application integrity and the ability to quickly and effectively solve user issues are critical to instilling confidence in its field force, Central turned to Tealeaf to manage its mission-critical web applications.
Case study about Health Insurance Claims Processing
The Challenge: When a major health insurer decided to overhaul its less-than-efficient claims processing system, the initiative came with a steep challenge: an aggressive 75-day ramp-up to full data capture services of over 250,000 claims per week. There was one more goal, too: further streamline claims processing by increasing the number of claims that auto-adjudicate upon data entering the customer systems.
The Solution: We took on the task, and immediately established a new facility in Lexington, Kentucky. There, we implemented state-of-the-art technology to perform all claims processing services, including full mailroom services, data entry, storage and retrieval, digital imaging, x-ray processing, online updating and Intelligence Queue/Data Cleansing.
Introduction: Introduced in the autumn of 1991 as a means of protecting infrastructure investments at a time of tight fiscal constraint, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has evolved to become an established method of procuring infrastructure by the public sector, including in the education, housing, health, transport and defence sectors. The policy is supported by all of the main political parties in Parliament.The problem with PFIs is the way in which they are passed into the future. This means our children and grandchildren will be given massive liabilities from the past, to pay. The Intergenerational Foundation is extremely concerned, not only at the number of new PFI contracts being tendered during a period of austerity, but also at the poor deals made on behalf of future taxpayers. These deals advantage the here and now, to the detriment of future generations.
Procuring Infrastructure: Under more traditional forms of Government procurement, typically the public sector designs the project and the private sector builds to this design, using either cost-plus contracts (with their well known moral hazard problems) or fixed-price contracts (which the private sector understandably dislikes in the face of unpredictable cost inflation). By contrast, under PFI, typically the public sector sets the goals of the project (for example in terms of the general specification of a new bridge, tunnel or hospital), but allows the private sector to come forward with differing ways of achieving the specification. Private finance projects usually define the outputs required, allowing some flexibility over the solution.
A Study about PFI Contract to Renew Council Schools
Overview: Private Finance Initiative deals can be complex, costly and controversial but are capable of delivering services that have hitherto not been thought affordable by other means. This report examines the PFI procurement of schools in Scotland and draws a number of main conclusions. Councils have managed the PFI processes well. Scotland’s PFI schools deals are at an early stage of their 25 or 30 year lives and it is too early to judge their contribution to education. However, based on the evidence from this study the schemes have been or are being negotiated in a professional, rigorous and constructive manner.
Introduction: There continues to be public interest and debate about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the private financing of public services. Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals are a very important component of procurement by the public sector. To date across the public sector in Scotland there is £2.7 billion investment in PFI deals (Exhibit 1), accounting for around one fifth of Scottish publicly sponsored capital expenditure over the period 1998-99 to 2002-03. Over the same period, PFI schools deals represent around one third of all Scottish local government capital expenditure including PFI.
