In our first-ever internal case competition, seven teams submitted proposals for new and innovative Centric solutions, many built on AI. Meet the two who rose to the top.
After weeks of preparation and competition, the Case Crushers and the Mind Benders have won the first-ever internal Centric Consulting Case Competition.
The brainchild of Senior Consultant Tam Truong, the Centric Case Competition pitted seven four-member teams in a quest for a business accelerator that could solve a specific business problem within Centric’s client offerings. To be eligible, each team needed to showcase how their project augmented our current offerings to provide a novel solution to our client’s evolving challenges.
“The inspiration was our Insurance Analytics Platform or IAP,” said Truong. “The IAP is a set of tools we provide our clients, enabling them to solve many needs within the insurance industry.” One of Centric’s mission is to continuously innovate and generate real, concrete solutions for our clients, I thought it would be great to make a competition out of it.”
Centric leadership bought into the idea quickly, investing $12,000 in prize money in the competition. Each member of the first-place Case Crushers team received $2,500 each, while members of the second-place Mind Benders team received $500 each.
“In addition to furthering our company innovation program, the Centric Case Competition also provides a fun, meaningful way for any employee to contribute to our overall success,” Truong said.
Open to all Centric full-time employees, participants completed their work independently, outside of work hours. Each team also received a partner advisor for assistance. After weeks of work, the Case Competition judges narrowed the seven-team field to the two finalists: Case Crushers and the Mind Benders. The two faced off in a live webcast on August 18, which opened voting to everyone at Centric.
The Case Crushers’ team included Austin Finley, Mary Vo, Robert Winston, and Katie Adastra. Their winning proposal was for Centric to partner with robotic process automation (RPA) tool Robocorp, which uses an open-source Python framework called the Robot Framework. Robocorp and the Robot Framework make RPA more accessible to smaller companies and those beginning their RPA journeys.
“Licensing costs, scalability and technical limitations are often a hurdle for smaller clients wanting to leverage RPA. Plus, these companies often want to keep their code in-house, which is easier to do with the Robot Framework,” their partner advisor Joe Smucny said. “The Robot Framework has the potential to allow us to provide a more cost-efficient solution to our smaller clients.”
The Mind Benders offered stiff competition. The Centric India team — Akshita Sharma, Manish Bhalla, Namitesh Mishra, Ansu Bhalla and their partner advisor, Andy Gurd — proposed developing an RPA and AI and machine learning (ML) product that that would allow organizations to automate the process of reading and rerouting emails.
The solution they built, called Intell-e-mail, could send acknowledgments back to the senders, collect data, and train the model on keywords so the automation can send emails to the appropriate recipients.
“Intell-e-mail delivers affordable, intelligent emailing for everyone,” Gurd said. “It is a customizable solution that decreases response time, increases reliable handling of messages and is available 24/7.”
Truong said that the depth and breadth of the seven participating teams validate the value of the Centric Case Competition. In fact, the competition will now become an annual event and will join CampIO, Centric’s annual technology conference for employees, as one of our ongoing innovation initiatives.
“This competition is what Centric is all about – using our best resources, our people, to come up with creative solutions to better serve our clients as well as allowing employees to be innovative and do what they love,” Truong said. “I am excited to see what the future holds as the Centric Case Competition continues!”
Meet the Runners-Up
Team: XCentric
- Members: Akhil Kumar, Christine LeBrun, Siddarth Datla, Shveta Arya
- Partner Advisor: Cheryl Strait
- Problem: Dental insurance providers and dentists struggle with administrative challenges and inefficiencies throughout the claims process.
- Solution: Use OpenAI’s GPT-4 to streamline the claims process, increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction and enhance the dental healthcare experience.
Team: STP
- Members: Sean Sweeney, Robert Hunter, Steve Dripps, Anthony Lung
- Partner Advisor: Sean Neben
- Problem: The insurance underwriting process is inefficient, increasing the time needed to issue policies to customers.
- Solution: Use ML and AI, along with a client’s existing data, to automate and optimize the underwriting process.
Team: Fantastic Four
- Members: Rolf Lorentzen, Christine Pearce, Colin McGee, Rozee De Canaga
- Partner Advisor: Matt Cotter
- Problem: Insurance clients are seeking a competitive advantage in the digital economy.
- Solution: Use our unique expertise, strong industry relationships, and portfolio of solution offerings to develop tailored non-fungible token (NFT) programs capable of generating four primary sources of value for insurance clients.
Team: SMAHT CARR
- Members: Alex Kurose, Clay Casey, Renee Murray, Ruchi Dwivedi
- Partner Advisor: Deb Peluso
- Problem: Residents of municipalities need better access to data about road conditions.
- Solution: Leverage Centric’s Data and Analytics and Centric India practices to develop an innovative platform that would use existing maintenance fleet data to generate real-time insights into track snow removal, breakdowns, or unwanted incidents.
Team: Epic to Azure
- Members: Jennifer Jackson, Heath Salva, Phil Gorman, Paul Holway
- Partner Advisor: Brian Offenbacher
- Problem: The healthcare and life sciences vertical is scrambling to migrate data from the EPIC healthcare management system to the cloud.
- Solution: Build a framework allowing clients to move from centralized, on-prem solutions quickly and easily to the Microsoft Azure Cloud, allowing them to access the cloud’s automation and innovation potential while protecting customer data.
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