	"Project Insight gives us one place to review where all our projects stand." - Asst. V.P., P2P Link

SUCCESS STORY - P2P Link

"Project Insight gives us one place to go to review where all our projects stand, as well as a way to communicate to clients the steps they need to take to stay on track."
--D. S., Assistant Vice President of Operations, P2P Link

The Company
Millions of transactions take place every month between payers and medical care providers for Workers' Compensation and Personal Automobile injury claims. Based in Illinois, P2P Link, a division of Fiserv, provides Internet-based services that make communications between the two groups faster, simpler, and less expensive. Overall, P2P Link applications streamline the billing and payment process for everyone concerned.

The Challenge
During the first two years of being in business, P2P Link managed its customer implementation projects using paper project plans printed from Microsoft Project. Working on over 30-50 active customer implementation projects at any given time, the P2P Link project managers found there was no way to establish any templates or methodologies with a mere desktop application. They had no tools in place to help customers keep up their end of implementation project tasks, nor to manage their customers' expectations.

In order to increase the productivity of their own project team and the customers, D. S., P2P Link's Assistant Vice President of Operations, and other managers sought to add true collaborative capabilities to their project management. A collaborative solution would also help establish project methodologies and templates that the project managers could follow and share.

D. S. said, "For a lot of our customers, implementing our products were looked at as one more task on a long to-do list. And the type of contacts we're dealing with varies a lot. We could be dealing with the billing manager, an IT person, or the physician himself. At the time we went looking for a solution, we were looking for a way to get our customers rolling, because our business is based on transactions. If it takes months and months to get them going, it doesn't do our business any good."

The Solution
D. S. and the P2P Link team prepared a list of nearly 50 different project management systems. After some review, they narrowed the list to about a dozen, and then reduced the list to a group of five. The evaluation team was seeking certain key features and needed the ultimate solution to be:

Web-based, like the company's own software solutions
Simple to use
Customizable

The P2P Link team was given live demonstrations by the final five vendors, then asked a key question: are you willing to customize? D. S. reported, "Project Insight won hands-down compared to most of the folks that we dealt with."

Project Insight was customized to fit P2P Link's exact business requirements.

The Results
P2P Link chose Project Insight from Metafuse, Inc. and did their first training session in February 2002, then began implementing it with customers immediately. A feature of Project Insight that has been heavily utilized by P2P Link are the auto-alerts. P2P Link uses the auto-alerts, setting them for their customers, which act as 'barking dogs.' The alerts signal the tasks that are about to be due, deliverables such as test files, test plans, and follow-up items.

D. S. said, "P2P Link's products may be purchased by someone in an economic role within the customer organization, then delegated as an action item to someone further down the totem pole, so there's not necessarily always good communication that implementing P2P Link is a key initiative. We can now set alarms so that if things start going awry, we can notify people in both organizations and help them police themselves."

He continued, "Our clients have really enjoyed it. One large hotel chain is a payer rather than a provider. They are really into project management. They've had 10-15 people using the system at any given time. Most of our customers find Project Insight easy, and are even able to spin up test files in a matter of hours."

Asked about the biggest advantage of using Project Insight, D. S. replied, "It's given us consistency and a template to work from. We never have anything that could be considered a normal implementation. Everything we do has a little bit of a twist. Now we're sure things are getting done. There's one place to go look at the project, and to document every step."