Putting in new systems is not a trivial task, there are internal costs as well as the cost of product and implementation services from your vendor.
Because of this, your case management solution must deliver significantly better return than the investment made. In terms of vendor costs, you should be looking at an ROI of twelve months or less. This ROI should include a component of one-off savings as well as significant on-ongoing savings.
These are the areas you should see significant improvement from your acquisition of a case management solution:
Increase case load
Your investigation management software must get you to a point where it truly embeds your investigation process (your’s not your software vendors).
In our experience, if this is the case your tool will then provide you with increase case load. This will be due to:
- Staff knowing what to do next (the software will tell them via it’s work queues)
- The data you enter once is re-used many times for many purposes.
- Your manual/click/copy/paste jobs you do in office documents are now automatic.
This means that you can increase your case load without increasing your admin staff or alternatively repurpose your admin staff to productive, money earning areas of the business due to the efficiencies of your new software.
Delivery 20 days earlier
Your software purchase needs to improve your delivery. In one case, an SIU has reduced their turn around time for genuine claims from 40 days to 20 days. This improved their relationship with the claims sections and led to an increase in cases referred.
It did not end there with more cases and more data several more ‘ring’ investigations have been initiated and the value the SIU is returning to their business has skyrocketed.
Historic ‘Yearly’ savings are now ‘Quarterly’ savings.
Do more with less
Your case management solution should also realize a return in the ratio of investigators to case managers/other admin staff. It is typical to save around 20% on administration costs due to re-purposing of staff from back-office work to investigative duties. It’s a major reason why our customers are growing and expanding their file counts without their internal costs growing at the same rate.
Increase SIU Performance
An enterprise investigation management system will improve your performance in these areas. This table demonstrates the areas that you benefit:
| Admin Costs down | Double handling,improved process, automation, reporting |
| Management Costs down | Improved process, clear dashboard, automation, communications with the team in the field, report creation time down due to one-click client reports and even scheduled reporting. |
| IT Costs down | Less need for package software, servers, IT specialists writing Databases |
| Case load up | Improved perception, improved cycle times, more consistent results will only please you clients and have them asking for more assistance. Are you up for that? |
Known and controllable IT Costs
A significant headache to all Investigation management practices is the never-ending, unknown of IT. Some of the surprises we’ve been told about include:
- Server replacements and upgrades.
- Server exchange housing
- Organising and ensuring backups, penetration testing and other things required by your clients.
- Microsoft licensing requirements.
- ‘The software guy’ leaves, dies or becomes disinterested.
- Your client wants another bunch of integration/spreadsheets/reports and your resource is on a break.
- Technology, best practice or laws change and you need to invest another $500K to integrate or comply.
Your investigation management system must bring clarity and consistency to this problem. Polonious Investigation Management Systems will give you no surprises and an ever improving ROI every single year.