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Case Study
Cloud

WSIB: Grounded in cloud

Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) future-proofs its critical insurance and claims services.

Challenge

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) is one of the largest workplace insurers in North America, covering more than five million people in some 300,000 workplaces.

While focused on the traditional business of workplace safety, WSIB is anything but traditional in keeping up with its customers’ evolving needs. That’s why it took a hard look at its aging and inflexible technology infrastructure and sought creative opportunities to transform it.

Over time, WSIB’s technology systems had grown complex, unwieldy and expensive to maintain.

WSIB knew it was time to reimagine the underlying technology capabilities and position the organization to continue to offer the best possible service to its customers, requiring an upgrade to both the legacy infrastructure and its management approach, to be digital-first and cloud-enabled.

What Accenture did

WSIB teamed up with Accenture to implement ambitious new digital and cloud offerings.

A core component of the new strategy was implementing a hybrid cloud approach to support both the technology infrastructure and related services. While WSIB intends to migrate most of its existing applications to the cloud over time, it also wanted to reach for the cloud right away, so the team immediately launched two new cloud-based portals for businesses and people, streamlining internal workflows, establishing a dedicated technical team, integrating data sources and upgrading the internal connections and interfaces.

The result was two big wins for WSIB's customers

Login-for-Business
A cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution that provides a new online portal for external businesses to interface with WSIB. Login-for-Business is the first major cloud initiative at WSIB and reaffirms their cloud-first direction for the modernization of its core services.

Online Service for People with Claims
A new online portal that extends WSIB’s core services for people with a claim to access of their information digitally. The online portal displays real-time information such as the status of their claim, payment information, health care benefit information, and a variety of self-service capabilities related to the lifecycle of their claim. This new channel leverages the same cloud-based IAM solution introduced through Login-for-Business.

People and culture

The cloud project has transformed the way people approach setting up technical environments for new services and solutions at WSIB, from the shared technical team to agile development methods and newly standardized approaches.

As the organization can now move faster and has eliminated many manual and redundant tasks, WSIB’s technology team has more time to engage in higher-value work and deepen their skills in other new digital and “cloud-grounded” solutions. Customers no longer need to resort to time-consuming phone calls to carry out basic tasks making WSIB a more responsive organization.

Value delivered

WSIB now has an infrastructure services strategy and cloud-grounded approach to better meet customer demands today and for years to come.

The end-to-end strategy standardizes processes, takes advantage of new capabilities such as self-service portals and automation, and improves customer engagement. The result is a more flexible technology and business organization, with much greater transparency around operating costs. WSIB is now in a position of strength and able to work with multiple vendors to boost customer service.

One aspect of the strategy, the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform, is already generating benefits for the organization. Provisioning infrastructure for new projects used to take days, and can now be accomplished in hours – what a difference!

70%

Now the average time spent by the customer online is now only three and a half minutes, resulting in 70% time savings for customers and additional call centre capacity for WSIB.

80%

As a result, the overall customer satisfaction score is 80%, cementing this portal as the highest rated digital product WSIB launched to date.

300%

WSIB now has over 500 services within Microsoft Azure - that represents a 300% increase in cloud adoption in just one year.

IaaS and PaaS at speed

Since the project began, the organization has put in place over 500 services within Microsoft Azure, including key infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

That represents a 300 percent increase in cloud adoption in just one year. Additionally, the team is currently working on 20 cloud-based initiatives for both front-end and back-end applications.

In parallel, WSIB continues to migrate all its infrastructure services and applications to the cloud. When COVID-19 caused a flood of customer claims, questions and new needs, WSIB’s new offerings enabled the organization to initially respond within hours, not days, and ultimately solve for the service demands within days, not months.

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The average time spent by the customer online is now only three and a half minutes, resulting in 70% time savings for customers and additional call centre capacity for WSIB.

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