Cost to serve in a week. 15 ways to cut it.

A large national payer needed to cut administrative cost without hurting service. Leadership could see the admin ratio, but not what drove it.

Below the P&L, total cost to serve by product or customer was not visible. Intercompany expenses did not tie out. Chargebacks moved cost between units without explanation. Different teams bought different software for the same work.

Its analytics strength was medical economics. The cost of running the company had never been measured the same way.

The data sat in nine domains that did not connect. They were process models, job families, org data, tech assets, location and market data, operational volume and productivity, product taxonomy, master vendor data, and master customer data. Together they describe how the company runs. They had never been joined.

Flume’s deployment team connected the nine domains in ContextBase. The team defined each business object once: process, role, application, site, product, vendor, customer, and cost center. It mapped every source system to those definitions and put the rules under version control.

Within a week, leadership had an initial view of total cost to serve by product, customer, and market. Intercompany charges and chargebacks traced to the work they funded. Every application showed which teams used it and which paid for it.

From that view, the payer identified initiatives to reduce administrative expense. It found duplicate software to retire, vendors to consolidate, chargebacks to fix, and work to automate.