Mutual of Omaha cuts vendor onboarding time by 50 days

Challenge

At Mutual of Omaha, the company's main goal of their customer success value “our noble purpose” means being there for customers during tough times. Kate Hiykel, Program Manager - Extended Enterprise Management shares, “We directly support our business lines and our other supporting areas to achieve their business goals, as a hundred plus year old insurance company with this noble purpose, so that they can continue to meet our customers’ needs.” 

Kate manages the vendor management program within the procurement division, focusing on ensuring vendors meet risk thresholds, regulatory requirements, and internal standards while conducting ongoing due diligence.

For a long time, Mutual of Omaha's vendor management process was fragmented and inefficient. "It was Excel and email and a SharePoint site," Kate explains. The team coordinated with 10+ partner teams for vendor onboarding with no centralized system for tracking or visibility.

The intake process was overwhelming, with 125 technical questions that caused significant friction. "By the time you got to question 50, you were dealing with decision fatigue," says Kate. "Those questions were so technical that even our officers couldn't figure out what they meant because they're not experts."

Vendors faced an equally frustrating experience, receiving several pages of information through multiple spreadsheet attachments. Lead times  were incredibly long, at one point reaching over 90 days. Risk partners lacked consistency and struggled without proper visibility into their review processes, contributing to a frustrating user experience internally and externally.

Solution

Mutual of Omaha implemented Zip in 2023, initially replicating their existing manual vendor intake process within the platform. With Zip’s end-to-end visibility, the team eventually realized there were opportunities for change. "That really gave us the leverage we needed to be able to level up and transform,” Kate shares.

The team underwent a comprehensive business transformation with Zip, starting with interviews across 100+ stakeholders enterprise-wide to reimagine their approach. The team examined current-state data and intentionally redesigned every step of the process, beginning with the intake questionnaire itself. Through this exercise, they reduced intake questions from 125 to 30 in Zip while eliminating excessive technical jargon. 

The team also consolidated duplicative vendor surveys into Zip's existing intake format, eliminating the spreadsheets they previously sent. "It's not multiple attachments, it's easy to answer, it's a one-stop shop for everyone," says Kate. They even built automated logic so vendors with SOC 2 or HITRUST certificates could bypass redundant questions.

Leveraging Zip's vendor portal allows for seamless communication between Mutual of Omaha and their vendors. "The vendor portal feature is one of my favorites because we can gather all that information, we have that audit trail, and we know exactly what the results are," Kate shares.

Results

With Zip, Mutual of Omaha’s vendor management team has seen dramatic improvements, reducing cycle times from 73 days to 23 days—a 50-day improvement.

User satisfaction has also soared, with one requester reporting "It would've taken me a week to fill this out the way that we had it engineered with 125 questions… now it takes me less than 30 minutes. And I still believe the results are more accurate than they were."

Zip’s audit trail and document retention capabilities met all regulatory requirements while improving the experience across teams. "The fact that we can bring together so many teams across the organization to achieve a request seamlessly… is not something that we could have done on our own without Zip,” says Kate.

Zip empowered Mutual of Omaha to transform vendor management while maintaining their commitment to being a trusted advisor to internal business partners and maintaining the company's high standards of integrity.