About Us
Orient Point Consulting LLC was founded in New York in 1997 by Gary Meyer. Orient Point is the name of the northeast point of Long Island, New York, USA where we were founded and this lighthouse stands. An “orient point” is the “you are here” location where navigators orient their map and plot their course. Your orient point is critical because you can’t get “there” from here if you don’t know where “here” is.
Gary Meyer invented AIM – Activity Information Modeling, when he founded the company in 1997. AIM is a unique and powerful management tool that our clients, such as Citibank, AIG, and Abbott Labs, have used to solve their toughest problems and achieve their most important goals.
Our clients engage and re-engage us year after year to deliver AIModels throughout their organizations because they get better, faster results, and more economically, than traditional improvement/transformation methods they have used in the past. On our twentieth anniversary, we were still engaged by two of our first three clients, Citibank and Chubb Insurance, and by two other companies with executives that had worked for Citi and Chubb who then engaged us at their new companies.
We are a multinational consulting company. We routinely conduct large scale projects that include working with many countries simultaneously and deliver AIModels in their native language. We build mirror image AIModels in the local language of the field operation and the language of the corporate headquarters office.
Our Business, Mission & Strategy
Business
Our business is helping our clients achieve new results. We help them solve their most urgent problems and achieve their most valuable goals.
Mission
Our mission is helping our clients build thriving organizations that provide high value products to customers, rewarding employment to employees, and solid returns to stockholders.
strategy
Our strategy is to deliver new information to our clients about their customers, products, processes, and resources; help our clients use this new information to make new decisions; and launch new programs that quickly achieve and sustain new performance results.
What We Do
We help companies achieve new performance results:
more profits, higher productivity, market share growth, and increased returns to shareholders.
We’ve developed powerful new operations (production and distribution) management information methodologies, tools, and technologies that solve complex problems and achieve new results faster and at less cost than traditional methods.
AIM Projects have been successful in more than 300 banking, insurance, and other complex service operations, in more than 30 countries since 1998.
We’re experts in conducting consulting projects for large, complex, multinational companies. We have deep, subject matter expertise in insurance and banking. That’s the world we worked in before founding Orient Point Consulting in 1997 and that world welcomed us and has kept us engaged when we showed them Activity Information Modeling.
For confidential information about us and our project history, please login and see our “Our History” page.
This is the kind of success we’ve helped our clients achieve.
- Citibank Private Bank raised its minimum assets on deposit from $2MM to $10MM for its North American and European customers after seeing the cost of its customer segments in its customer and product AIModels. After this change the bank doubled its assets on deposit in 18 months and doubled it again in the next 36 months. Profits more than tripled. They became one of the world’s largest private banking organizations and they have remained in that top tier.
- AIG’s Global Claims Division onducted AIM projects to provide information for a Global Express Claims Program whose goal was to settle 50% of its claims within 24 hours of first notice. This program succeeded in reducing claims operations costs by 38% to 62%. The company’s hyper-fast settlement services became a unique strength and keystone of a new marketing identity that helped some countries achieve and sustain double digit sales increases.
- Chubb Insurance Specialty used its AIModels to design the industry’s first “tri-track” renewal process: high touch, low-touch and no touch tracks. This tri-track renewal process 1) increased customer retention to over 95%, 2) increased Underwriting productivity over 50%, and reduced the renewal process cost by more than 60%. These improvements achieved high sustainable growth and our client became the largest Specialty Insurer in the US within three years, and went on to dominate the industry, a position it still holds.
- Citibank Private Bank conducted an AIM project that discovered they lost 18% of branch resource capacity to activities related to checking the status of transactions. They used their AIModels to design automated transaction status alerts that included the customers. This was in 1999 and it was the first banking transaction notice system. Since some people did not have email, they alerted customers without email by phone with an automated voice in the language of the country. This system set a very high standard that no other banks were able to match and for many years distinguished Citi from all other banks. When they reduced their resource capacity costs for transaction status activities by 18% they saw their branch profitability improve.
- An AIM project’s “what if” scenarios of Chubb American Commercial Insurance Division discovered that their branch-centric organization was over 40% more expensive than a service center organization would cost and a service center organization would provide better expertise and service to field underwriters and customers. They designed precise services center blueprints for each line (product group) throughout the country using their AIModels. After the initial organizational transformation costs were incurred, Chubb’s new centers reduced costs by over 40% and increased productivity by almost 50%. These centers achieved the highest level of insurance expertise and the highest productivity in the industry. They continue to dominate the industry and are now the world’s largest underwriter in many commercial lines.
What Our Clients Say About Us
“Before, we had no way at all of knowing our costs for inquiries or claims for all of our different services, line of business, type of calls or by customer types. Now, because of AIM, we know our costs for those down to the cent and we know what we can do to reduce them. Having the exact costs also means that we can align our pricing by customer and product segment - which we're doing now. Plus, by saving FTE expense on incoming calls, those resources are being used for outgoing calls to support the customer intimate/high value-added effort to create high customer loyalty.”
"I've engaged Orient Point Consulting since 2001 at Chubb Insurance, then at XL and recently at CNA. I've always been able to solve my problems and achieve my goals by using their activity information models as my core information for analysis and planning".
"AIM is a unique and valuable tool for us. It delivers new information needed to make better decisions to achieve our goals."
How We Do It
We build Activity Information Models of our clients’ Customers, Products, Processes, and Resources. Our AIModels give our clients NEW information specifically designed for their problems and goals. We lead our clients in the analyses of their problems, conduct scenarios analysis (what-ifs) and help our clients prepare new solutions that can be quickly and successfully implemented. Every AIModel is delivered with Excel worksheets that make analyses and reporting easy for everyone.
Results = Information X Decisions
New Results = New Information X New Decisions
To achieve new results, new decisions must be made with new information. It must start with new information, old information produces the same old decisions that produced yesterday’s old results. Activity Information Models deliver new information our clients have never had. They make new decisions and achieve new results.
AIM – Activity Information Modeling is a new, innovative and proprietary management methodology that collects data from people as they work and builds database information models, with quantitative information about customers, products, processes, and resources, CP2R.
Gary Meyer developed/invented Activity Information Modeling in 1997. Gary was a Senior Consultant with Chatham Consulting Group Inc during the 80’s where his clients were Citibank, American Express, Swiss Bank & AIG. Chatham was an operations consulting company that focused on production and delivery operations in financial service companies. After Chatham, Gary joined Johnson & Higgins, a global insurance broker where he created an operations management department. Marsh & McLennan merged with J&H and Gary continued as VP of Operations Management Services of Marsh until early 1997 when he left to start Orient Point Consulting LLC.
AIModels are specifically designed to solve each client’s problems and achieve their goals. You’re probably familiar with data models. But data doesn’t tell you anything and it can’t be used for decision making. We build information models, not data models. AIModels provide the time and the cost of every field and variable.
AIModels give executives a 360 degree look at their business and the ability to analyze customer, product, process and organization dynamics together. This is important because:
Performance problems are never isolated, they’re intertwined with other issues in other areas that must also be addressed.
Every change creates a number of “ripple effect” impacts. AIModels create scenarios that forecast what the ripple effects will be for contemplated changes.
Very large (“leap-scale”) performance improvements can only occur when a number of improvements are made simultaneously; in multiple areas such as process and technology changes in conjunction with organizational changes and new product variations.
Large scale performance changes almost always fail unless everyone and everything that is impacted is prepared, aligned, and synchronized. AIM provides the information that is needed to precisely blueprint, from the customer segment level down to the activity level, what changes will occur.
CP2R (CPR) is our acronym for Customers, Products, Processes, and Resources. This is the scope of a typical AIM project. This scope is far broader than traditional consultant’s scope. Tradiutional consultants select a single area such as process and only work on that. They don’t assemble information about anything beyond the small area they’re focused on. This results in recommendations that are not feasible because of unaccounted impediments and constraints in other areas. This small scope also produces small tangible benefits.
AIM projects have also been conducted in staff functions such as Accounting, IT, HR, etc. with much success. The scope of a stafff AIM project modifies our usual CPR scope.
AIM projects have also been conducted in staff functions such as Accounting, IT, HR, etc. with much success. The scope of a stafff AIM project modifies our usual CPR scope.
Customer AIModels provide time and cost information about customers, customer segments, and customer activities,
The customer models are used to understand the customer segments, and often note those that have the lowest and highest ROI. It’s common for our clients to modify their target markets/customer segments, sometimes even eliminating a segment because they discover the low profits it produces.
The product models are used to compare all products to find those that produce the highest and lowest margins.
The AIM product model information makes it easy to see a complete 360 degree view of the cost and resource capacity requirements for the entire product portfolio in one simple report
The AIM product model information makes it easy to see a complete 360 degree view of the cost and resource capacity requirements for the entire product portfolio in one simple report
The process models provide information about lost productivity, poor quality and retention areas. These are generally quick, simple fixes that only require simple operation changes.
Chubb Specialty, the specialty lines division of Chubb Insurance in Simsbury, Connecticut used their AIM process models to design a tri-track renewal process that produced a large, multi-year growth spurt, increased their productivity over 50%, and achieved record high customer retention rates.
The resource models explain how every minute of the entire organization’s resource capacity is consumed by customer, products, and processes. This information is used to improve job positions, organization design, and resource performance.
What Is AIM – Activity Information Modeling?
AIM – Activity Information Modeling captures the activity as the nucleus of organizational endeavor. It then surrounds it with other data attributes that are needed for the specific problems and goals of the client. It adds metadata, such as the complexity level of processes. Finally if calculates time and cost for each data field such as resource time spent on a product and the cost of each customer segment.
AIM – Activity Information Model Exhibit
This example lists common data fields that are used frequently. Any data attribute field and metadata can be incorporated into an AIModel. We have never failed to be able to provide a client with unique information that they needed for their analyses and decision making.
AIM Exhibits
Click these links to see AIM exhibit videos.
- Customer Information
- Product Information
- Process Information
- Resource Information
- AIModel
A Comparison of Our Approach & Traditional Consultants’ Approach
Traditional Consultants’ Approach To Information
Traditional management consultants gather existing information from their clients, hoping they can find something new that the client couldn’t. This existing information is almost always qualitative and never 100% homogenous. Clients’ existing information rarely has time and cost associated with it. Existing information always fails to provide everything that is needed.
Traditional consultants frequently supplement this old information with a small set of current observations and interview information which is qualitative, not quantitative. Observations and interviews are also very laborious, expensive, and time consuming to the project
Our Approach To Information
Traditional management consultants gather existing information from their clients, hoping they can find something new that the client couldn’t. This existing information is almost always qualitative and never 100% homogenous. Clients’ existing information rarely has time and cost associated with it. Existing information always fails to provide everything that is needed.
Traditional consultants frequently supplement this old information with a small set of current observations and interview information which is qualitative, not quantitative. Observations and interviews are also very laborious, expensive, and time consuming to the project
What Makes Us Better?
Every consultant says they’re unique. Sometimes it’s true, most times it’s not.
We don’t tell our clients that we’re unique…
They tell us.
These are the things they mention.
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This exhibit is from a global insurance company’s Claims operations AIM project. It lists observations from the initial review of AIM reports. Observations summarize potential improvement opportunities and bring them to the attention of the management team. Observations become “Findings” when they are vetted as compelling, feasible, and have a documented implementation approach, budget and ROI forecast.
This is the kind of success we’ve helped our clients achieve.
- Accounting & Finance use our cost models for their reporting and forecasting. They find the cost ratios and metrics especially useful for budgeting.
- Marketing uses our Product AIModels to create growth program scenarios that optimize product portfolio profitability. This is a totally new capability for them.
- C-suite executives use AIModels to compare units’ & locations’ performance with metrics such as productivity and cost per 1K of revenue. Our succinct performance metrics helps them understand what actually drives growth and profits in their businesses.
- Human Resources use our resource models to document the scope of job positions and the skills they require. Our reports show them exactly what each job actually does and how they do it.
- IT uses AIModels to understand how systems are used and by whom. They can also spot redundancies in their technology infrastructure. Finally, they can see the processes and activities that need greater automation and technology and what the ROI would be if they build them. Our first project with Citibank found 7 separate systems that all handled the same product transactions. Citi managers immediately consolidated these to 3 and reduced these to one system within 18 months. This small peripheral finding, unrelated to the project’s goals, produced annual IT savings over $250,000.
This exhibit is a graph that displays an insurance company’s premium productivity per hour. AIM projects prepare a set
of performance metrics for executives and managers. They are useful for comparisons to other units and as benchmarks
for future reference.