How Operations Creates Profit
By: Brandy Drzymkowski
Tags: Accounting, Career Advice, Operations, Careers, Career Change

Streamlining leads to higher profits. Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Cory Walker started out at Humana Insurance as a temporary worker who was promoted to customer service. He was recently promoted again, this time to Accountant 2 (which he informed me is actually a higher position than Accountant 1). His responsibilities in this role fall under the operations umbrella, so I asked him about specifics to see what I could learn.

1. In what way does your role bring value to the company?

We oversee three regions of the U.S.: Central, Northeast, and Puerto Rico. We are responsible for the claims and provider settlements that come in. We make sure the regions are still profitable and implement proper rules and projections as needed.

In terms of making processes more efficient, I do both the idea funneling and the implementation. I have complete control over my support files so if I can streamline a process, that’s good. I can’t make company and departmental decisions. Those are mostly predetermined based on contracts and we don’t make the contracts. I’m assuming the sales teams handle those contracts since they are prenegotiated.

2. What is the most important way you bring value to the role?

I would say overall I’m more efficient on the tech side. I’m good at streamlining support and creating efficient processes, more so than the accounting logic. I know the basics of accounting but not enough to say that’s my most valuable skill.

3. In what ways does your role overlap with customer support?

We don’t work directly with a member or customer like support does. Our support would be for our regions and the people who oversee those regions. We’re in contact monthly with the people in Puerto Rico and we make sure they’re happy. Those are our customers that we provide support to. We are more behind the scenes than support because they’re constantly making calls to customers.

4. What is a hard skill you should know before going into this role?

The only thing that’s constant is that everything’s always changing. Being able to adapt to constant change is a must. Learning the ins and outs of insurance and how it intertwines with working with the government is also helpful.

A tech skill that would be useful is typing out Sequel scripts. I had to learn. It was new to Humana — we use an access database and we transitioned to Sequel. It was hard, but it’s a lot easier once you learn it all. That’s one of the bigger ways to move up is by becoming more efficient with coding and developing processes.

Another would be Excel. I learned Excel on the fly.

5. Do you ever have an idea for streamlining that you aren’t able to implement?

It depends. We get support from the service fund — what we do corrects the mistakes they make. If they could streamline their process it would lessen our work a little bit.

The company gives out awards every year for people who find ways to improve and bring significant value. I just transitioned in October to this new role. I was on the premium side, and now I know the claims, which go hand in hand. I was on more of a product level before.

6. Did knowing the product help your transition into this new role?

They actually found me and asked if I wanted the job before they posted it. I was under a manager who left a year ago. When I got back from paternity leave, she reached out to me and asked if I wanted this position on her new team. So now I have the same manager I had before. It was more of a networking thing, but I definitely had the chance to show her my work habits in my previous role.