SmartConnect Transforms BCBSN’s Integration Workflow, Replacing Integration Manager

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska (BCBS) is part of the nations’s largest and most experienced health care benefit companies, The Blue Cross and Blue Shield organization, which provides health benefit plans to more than 98 million people nearly one-third of all Americans in 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The Nebraska-based group exists to deliver valuable health and wellness solutions to their 700,000+ customers. With a large customer base and high volume of transactions, BCBS needed to take their newly acquired ERP solution Microsoft Dynamics GP and turn it into an Enterprise billing system.

Problems & Challenges

Blue Cross Blue Shield needed to bill and send statements to a large volume of customers, process incoming transactions in GP, process payroll and had a short timeline to complete the projects due to internal company deadlines. They knew they needed an efficient solution and they needed it right away. In order to turn GP into the Enterprise billing system they needed, BCBS first addressed their most crucial need – integrations – and reached out to their Microsoft Reseller, Tectura, for recommendations. Tectura recommended SmartConnect from eOne Solutions as their go-to integration solution. John Juno, Financial Delivery Technical Lead for BCBS, shared the decision making process:

“We realized there were things we needed that were missing in GP. We knew we didn’t want to write our own integrations or use Integration Manager because we wanted to schedule our integrations…we could easily see that SmartConnect was the way we wanted to go.”

Prior to working with GP, BCBS had used CoreLink for all their billing needs. After deciding to use GP instead, they realized that their billing needs were unique to GP’s out of the box functionality. To start, they made a decision that their integrations needed to be scheduled – to offload the work of “manual integration” so their team could focus their attention elsewhere. To solve their dilemma, SmartConnect was used to meet their need and schedule integrations to run out of the box. Juno commented “SmartConnect was equivalent to having another full time person working on the team.”

One of the first integrations BCBS completed was around their payroll processing. They moved from a Biz Talk integration to SmartConnect – integrating 14,000 payroll transactions a month from an outside data source into GP. After setting up their SmartConnect map the process was automated and maintenance was, according to Juno, “much easier” as they had more (or better) support for the tool.

They did the same with their check file integrations and used SmartConnect to process over 16,000 transactions and 500-600 bank voids per month, this time replacing their Integration Manager integrations and speeding up the process overall.

Taking SmartConnect Further

BCBS also needed to integrate to the Contract Management section of GP. Without an eConnect node available out of the box, they needed to create the node and publish it to their SmartConnect map so they could easily map the integration. By adding eOne’s Node Builder to their solution, BCBS was able to create the custom node without having to write code. Juno explained their need:

“Integrations with Contract Management were critical for what we needed to do with billing. We didn’t want to process it manually, so Node Builder was the perfect fit for our need.”

Through all integration processes, BCBS utilized SmartConnect’s pre and post-map tasks to email themselves notifications on failures and successes of all integrations.

BCBS was able to quickly set up their integrations and become independent on SmartConnect by having the eOne team onsite for two days of classroom training and two days during the implementation process. Juno shared his satisfaction with training:

“We did half of the integrations that we had a goal to complete right in training & saved 80 to 100 hours of time creating integrations ourselves, plus we had the tools in house to complete the remaining integrations on our own.”

Beyond onsite training and consulting, BCBS purchased ongoing support with eOne so they had access to the team whenever a need would arise. Juno finalized his thoughts, his experience utilizing SmartConnect, Node Builder and working with the eOne team by stating “I’m very satisfied with our decision. eOne has helped us and continues to help us reach our goals.”

SmartConnect was the equivalent of having another full-time person working on the team.

John Juno, Financial Delivery Technical Lead at BCBS