Morneau Shepell: delivering long-term value to OTIP

By Sean Galea-Pace
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Paul Sywulych, Vice President of Digital Innovation at Morneau Shepell, discusses the value in his organisation’s collaboration with OTIP...

Morneau Shepell is a leading provider of technology-enabled HR services that provide an integrated approach to employee wellbeing through a cloud-based platform. Its core focus is to provide everything their clients need to support the mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing of their people.

Paul Sywulych is the Vice President of Digital Innovation at Morneau Shepell. He has been with the company for over 26 years in a variety of different roles. In his current position, he leads a number of key enterprise initiatives to leverage AI, machine learning and advanced technologies to improve the lives of employees and to help organisations maximise the value of their human capital.

Since 2014, Morneau Shepell has partnered with Ontario Teachers Insurance Plan (OTIP) and overseen OTIP’s growth from 20,000 members to more than 230,000. “We provide an array of solutions around health and pension administration,” explains Sywulych. “This ranges from outsource solutions for large organisations across North America to system only solutions that we provide to OTIP. As we make incremental improvements to the technology platform that supports OTIP, they automatically get the benefits of our investment because it helps us and them too.”

Sywulych points to the importance of delivering long-term and sustainable value to partnerships such as OTIP, and recognises the benefits this has. “OTIP has been a great partner for us and is one of our largest health administration clients in Canada. They knew they needed a strong administrative platform to accelerate their growth because of the speed of adoption of a standardised benefits plan across Ontario for teachers,” he explains. “One of the most interesting things from working with OTIP is that they really opened their doors to us. They welcomed us to spend time with them and we had our people hands-on during an 18 month implementation.” Sywulych believes offering that continued support is the key to success. “I believe that if you don’t help people run the software correctly and offer that ongoing support then it all falls apart so it’s vital you’re there,” he says. “We don’t just take a ‘set it and forget it’ approach. We continue to evolve the software platform because we do so for not just one client but for many. We’re doing incremental enhancements to the software to support technology trends and how things are changing.”

Looking to the future of the partnership, Sywulych believes observing the latest trends in the industry and operating with an agile and lean approach is essential to success over the next few years. “Our goal from a UX perspective is to make our customers’ interactions with software straightforward and try and reduce some of the things that they need to do so they can focus more on the areas of value add,” he explains. “In the near future, we’re looking at what’s the next thing that will drive the most value for our clients and we’re focused primarily around three key pillars: consumer grade experiences, the way in which we leverage AI, and augmenting additional things that matter to people. At Morneau Shepell, we’re also investing in initiatives such as voluntary benefits that extend the value proposition that employers can offer to their people.”

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