Deploying the ideal strategy to better serve customers

Réunica Group uses SAS® to manage enterprise performance strategy, be a customer-focused leader in France's social insurance economy

To enhance its track record of delivering quality social welfare services to its customers, the Réunica Group – one of France's largest health and personal insurance groups and the leader in supplementary pensions, managing EUR 8.1 billion (US$11.8 billion) in financial assets for 1.6 million pension beneficiaries – uses SAS to solidify its position as a strategic, customer-focused leader in France’s social economy.

"We found early on that a strategy, no matter how good it is, delivers mediocre results if it is not implemented with the right tools," explains Murielle Melot, Manager of Performance Management. "We needed a system to remove the gap between the perspectives of senior management and operational management on a daily basis, so that our strategy could be applied at all levels of the company as part of a continuous process, and to ensure consistency between the short-term results and creation of value over the long term."

A balanced strategy

To support its enterprise-wide performance management program, Réunica used SAS to help manage all stages of its corporate initiatives, including modeling strategic maps, establishing measures to be implemented and determining performance indicators.

"We developed strategic maps based on the five principles of the balanced scorecard: financials, internal processes, customers, organizational learning and sustainable development," explains Emmanuelle Guguen, Head of Decision Support Services. "Then came the definition of a 'strategic firm', embodied by our strategic pillars – with customer service as the basis and the ambition to be a major player in the social economy at the top."

Taking action

Following the initial implementation stage, Réunica focused on aligning the organization's employees with its strategic objectives by determining action variables and performance indicators, as well as identifying departmental managers to monitor performance.

"For the objective of increasing market share, for example, the action variable is to increase the number of appointments per sales representative," explains Melot. "And the indicator is the average weekly number of appointments for each of those individuals, which is monitored by the sales manager. The definition of performance indicators and ratios is a long process and subject to debate, but it's imperative to reach a consensus."

Cause and effect

With the strategic objectives set and the departmental action variables and performance indicators in place, Réunica uses SAS to validate the cause and effect of every strategic objective and adjust, if necessary, the variables.

"Today, 400 users access the SAS solution through an online portal," says Christophe Lebert, Head of Decision Solutions at GIE Systalians, Réunica's information systems resource partner. "This new decision-making support application is completely integrated with Réunica's enterprise decision support system, covering its core areas of business – wealth, pensions, health, marketing and sales. Management uses color-coded alerts to monitor indicators and performance and can compare different historical periods, as well as drill down to see how a specific indicator was calculated."

Dynamic strategy

Réunica also uses SAS to establish correlations in the data and statistically compare the strategy models to the performance of causal chains.

"SAS allows strategic models to be refined as needed for a dynamic approach to strategy over time," concludes Melot.