Every Manager's Guide to Business Processes:

The customer service agent who answers your call to the insurance firm USAA can access all the information the firm has about you, including electronic copies of handwritten letters. The agent can process your entire "case" and not submit you to the time-wasting, "Sorry, you need to phone...." Most successful redesign of customer service processes relies on bringing work and information to a case manager in this way and making fifteen minutes the time to handle transactions that used to take days or even weeks.

The concept of case management may well be process innovation/redesign/re-engineering's single most important contribution to business. It substitutes integration for division of labor, the norm in organizations for more than a century. Division of labor breaks complex tasks into component tasks that can be handled by staff with specialized skills and focused responsibilities. Thus, the purchasing department orders goods and accounts receivable authorizes, and finance makes, payment. At the extreme of division of labor we have the automobile assembly line, on which individual workers exert little or no influence over and exhibit negligible knowledge of and, in many instances, interest in any but their own circumscribed process activities.

Proponents of reengineering emphasize that division of labor is antithetical to the process view. From the process perspective, a process is a single job, not the series of separate "jobs" which division of labor disaggregates it. Reengineering assigns responsibility for that process to a single individual, the case manager. The impact of case management on process execution can be dramatic. IBM Credit Corporation's process for issuing computer financing quotes used to require seven days and span five functional areas. Today it is handled by a case manager and takes six hours. Structuring the job around the process flow rather than the reverse has enabled IBM to prepare ten times as many quotes as it did ten years ago with fewer staff than it had then. Or consider the installation of Centrex telephone service, which took Pacific Bell five days and involved eleven jobs and the updating of nine computer systems. Not surprisingly, errors and rework were frequent and representatives often had to return to customers for additional information, which introduced delays and engendered frustration. Today, with service coordinators handling all customer contacts and directly interacting with all computer systems from their computer workstations, 80 percent of orders can be filled on the same day. In both companies, the customer now has a single point of contact, the case manager.

Case management is becoming common in customer service. Its features are standard across types of business and service. 

• A case manager (an individual or part of a team of case managers who share the workload) handles a process end to end, from the making to the fulfillment of a customer request.
  
  
• Customers have a single point of contact, the case manager, usually reached through a toll-free telephone number.
  
  
• Case managers enjoy considerable discretion in dealing with problems and exceptions; empowerment is essential for case managers who are expected to provide real service, not just execute rote steps in a process.
  
  
• Work and information flow to and from case managers, who are, in effect, centers of hubs; they do not have to send paper to another department for, say, placing an order but instead update the relevant computer systems directly from the workstation. Similarly, the case managers never have to say, "I don't know; you need to contact our XYZ department to get an answer to your question." The XYZ department is in effect in the computer workstation. 

Massive organizational change is implicit in a shift from the traditional organization of work along functional and departmental lines to integration of work across an entire process. Case management may be far more rewarding, but it is also generally more demanding and stressful. It requires new personal skills, end-to-end process knowledge, and familiarity with often complex computer systems. Moreover, the work can be isolating, involving limited interaction with other workers and demanding intense concentration. At the extreme, it creates a sort of service factory, with case managers no less chained to their telephones or service desks than auto workers to their assembly line stations. Finally, it is all too tempting for managers to monitor worker productivity via computer, using detailed performance reporting to measure even the average length of customer telephone calls.

On the positive side, case management almost invariably improves customer satisfaction and reduces both company costs and service delivery time, often dramatically. Fifteen minutes is the new norm for service at the customer moment of value when case management is combined with information technology.

Its negative side is summarized in an article on case management. 

[People] feel they are not doing their jobs if they are not peering at the screen, typing at the keyboard, or talking on the telephone. Even when the job involves analyzing real customer problems or talking to real customers on the telephone, tangible social interaction is lost. Even the tangibility of paper and files is missed; as one case manager put it, "Instead of putting a completed file into the out-box, I feel like I am sending it into a black hole." (Thomas H. Davenport and Nitin Nohria, "Case Management and the Division of Labor", Sloan Management Review [winter 1994]: 19.) 

Many firms address the negatives by employing case management teams, often, ironically, reintroducing division of labor into the process.

Firms committed to reengineering customer service processes are clearly moving toward case management. The significant organizational challenges they will almost surely encounter on this route are often underestimated by proponents of reengineering who adopt an industrial engineering perspective on workflows. Not mentioned in the articles and books lauding one of the first and most successful instances of case management, the Mutual Benefit insurance company, is that the stresses, uncertainties, and difficulties of learning new skills led some employees to express their frustration by picketing their employer's head office.