Vendor sourcing is critical to health insurer Blue Cross & Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) as it faces a continuous struggle to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing environment while being mindful of costs and ensuring alignment to enterprise business goals such as market growth and business effectiveness. In response, a cross-functional workgroup led by Enterprise Learning & Development (EL&D) created a Vendor Engagement curriculum to ensure the workforce is equipped with knowledge of BCBSNC’s contracting process and has the ability to manage and interact with vendors for successful service delivery.
Program Details
Online courses, live workshops, and job aids are provided to those in roles that require a deep understanding of the vendor selection, contracting, and management processes. The first phase is role-specific for project managers (PMs) and business analysts (BAs), as a majority of projects now include significant vendor management components. A vendor management half-day workshop is facilitated monthly by one of BCBSNC’s vendor contract experts and online course “Vendor Management for PMs” launched last August. Phase 2 targets training for business owners, leaders, and key stakeholders who are directly involved in vendor engagement. A variant of the PM/BA workshop was offered starting in fourth quarter 2014 for business owners/stakeholders.
For everyone else, EL&D created a series of videos in BLOOM (BCBSNC’s on-demand video learning portal) to provide more information on vendor engagement. These videos fall into three categories:
- Explainer videos
- Executive roundtables
- “Man on the street” conversations.
The explainer videos use a telestrated animated whiteboard approach to informally define and walk through processes. The executive roundtables have key members of BCBSNC’s leadership talking about important issues with vendor engagement. And the “man on the street” videos ask an employee a specific vendor-related question. All videos are kept short, with the longest still less than six minutes in length. For longer forums such as the executive roundtable, EL&D identified appropriate breakpoints to split the session into short videos.
EL&D has provided eight vendor engagement workshops for PMs and BAs, training a total of 158. Additional workshops were scheduled for the end of 2014 and first quarter 2015, after which the monthly PM workshop was set to go to a quarterly schedule. The first business owner workshops for vendor engagement were held the end of last year. Business owner workshops will continue on a monthly basis in 2015 until all business owners and other key stakeholders for vendor engagement are trained.
Results
The impact to the organization has been immediate, with a significant reduction (approximately 22 percent) in scope changes in vendor projects. New vendor engagements are much smoother, with the appropriate business resources and shared services included up front in the engagement process. Overall annual cost savings are estimated at $1.4 million.
