About the customer
With more than a million insured and a premium income of a good 2.7 billion Swiss francs, the Visana Group is one of Switzerland’s leading health insurers. It employs 1,200 personnel at the headquarters in Berne and over 150 branches throughout Switzerland.
The Visana Group provides insurance for private and corporate customers. Under the Visana, sana24 and viva-care brands, Visana offers customized solutions for the mandatory nursing care insurance, supplementary and non-life insurance as well as accident insurance. With «Visana business» corporate customers benefit not only from insurance solutions and support for their occupational health management (OHM) but also for process optimization issues.
The Challenge
Print output is an important means of communication for health insurers. The workflows and manual processes behind the printing, packaging, and delivery of notifications, statements, and insurance documents are costly and labor-intensive.
Outsourcing print output to a third party is the perfect solution. Outsourcing output management to a specialist external service provider such as SPS produces greater efficiency at a lower cost than if the same duties were performed in-house.
Visana initially only had its print workflow handled via an external service provider. When the need for investment arose on the packaging side, Visana outsourced it to the same service provider. Whilst it was a good idea itself, the plan failed due to poor project management. Visana, therefore, evaluated other alternatives – including complete insourcing.
The Solution
After thorough testing and evaluation of all options, Visana decided to outsource output management on an integrated basis to SPS.
The challenge for the print workflow lies in the detail. Correspondence is ultimately not just a business card, a face to the outside world, but also an important tool for fostering relations with the customers.
Right from the outset, Visana and Swiss Post Solutions had a common understanding of the required quality and service. As a competent and experienced output management partner, SPS was able to overcome minor obstacles in the adjustments to the envelopes. SPS also met Visana’s requirements regarding flexibility which is often mentioned as a hindrance when it comes to outsourcing output management.
The integration of the entire output management process in the mail sorting centers of Swiss Post has created key competitive advantages for Visana. In numbers’ terms this involves the prompt execution of more than 100 different print jobs with demand volumes far exceeding the capacity of smaller service providers:
- Daily volumes: 10,000 to 20,000 mailings involving 30,000 to 40,000 printed pages
- Premium statements: Periodic dispatch of approx. 250,000 mailings involving around 750,000 printed pages
- Insurance policies: Annual dispatch of approx. 1.1 million mailings involving around 2.3 million printed pages
Visana’s huge volumes and mass production do not pose a problem for Swiss Post Solutions. On the contrary: the high processing capacity of SPS generates economies of scale and consequently attractive unit prices from which Visana still benefits.
Having production within the Swiss Post mail centers and the direct feed into the postal distribution cycle dispenses with the need for transport and avoids interface delays. Thanks to the continuous mailing controls, the processes through which an individual mailing passes, from production through to receipt by the addressee, remain transparent at all times, guaranteeing Visana that every mailing has been produced and dispatched in full.
Furthermore, with SPS as an outsourcing partner, Visana benefits from ISO and FINMA certified security and quality standards throughout the entire process.
The Benefits
Since Swiss Post Solutions is responsible for the output processing, Visana no longer incurs any internal infrastructure and fixed costs for the output management. The resultant reduction in the strain on its own resources will benefit its core business and customer service.
- Professional and efficient customer communication
- Customized Service Levels which can be flexibly adapted as required at any time
- Quality-assured production and processing of mass mailings without any capacity bottlenecks
- Data preparation, printing, packaging, and dispatch all under one roof
SPS as an Output Management Partner
Swiss Post Solutions innovate processes across a range of industries, both as concentrated projects and as part of larger partnerships. We are a global full-service provider of physical and digital document management and business process services.
Our deep and unrivaled experience in Intelligent Automation (IA) technology and core business process experience allows us to design and implement world-class solutions for each stage of the digital journey. For any service needing pioneering solutions for document processing, document scanning, or business process automation (BPA), SPS is the preferred vendor for hundreds of fortune 500 companies across the globe.
To see how SPS could improve your business processes,