When you're a company like General Electric Co., making 50 to 100 acquisitions a year, you need to be as good at integrating new businesses as at buying them. And consolidating insurance programs is a large part of that job, given that GE buys master insurance programs that cover all of its businesses and then relies on the Marsh broker network for local presence.

Once an acquisition is finalized, says Rafael Rivera, GE's manager of insurance programs, "it's the job of the corporate insurance group to integrate the acquired company into GE's global insurance programs." Although GE had an integration technology platform, "it was just a broken process and the acquisition volumes just kept on increasing," says Andrew Lileika, GE's black belt in corporate insurance. "We left policies in place when we should have cancelled them–or even worse, we cancelled policies when we should have kept them."

The project team, led by Lileika and Rivera, sought input from its business units and brokers and designed a new process with well-defined deliverables and cycle times for each role holder, paying special attention to the handoffs. The application was redesigned too, and new features were added: defined tasks, timeline and escalations; user-defined checklist questions for brokers; an integration progress dashboard; and a scorecard recording savings and outcome.