2015 Fall Internship with Accolade Management Services

My name is Kyle Domsohn and I am a rising Senior within the Temple Fox School of Business. My internship with the Accolade Management Services, owned by Bernie Heinze of the Heinze Group, began on August 11, 2015 and will continue through the end of January 2016. One of the services provided by Accolade Management Services is managing associations, which includes Insurance and Legal education.  I work as a Business Analyst, maintaining, updating, and reporting Continued Learning Education (CLE) for the Insurance Society of Philadelphia, which is a relatively new association for Accolade Management Services. The data involved is organized by databases set up using Microsoft Access. My roles and responsibilities include:

• Maintaining, updating, and reporting on the company legal education accreditation database using MS Access.
• Direct interaction with customers satisfying requests, providing information and troubleshooting.
• Working with customers, system users and management to analyze and document current business processes.
• Recommending process improvements and changes to management and then working with team to implement successful solutions.

During my internship, I gained valuable experience relative to the MIS world. As a business analyst my first project was to analyze and implement a solution for our newly acquired association, the Insurance Society of Philadelphia (ISOP). ISOP is an organization that maintains, updates, and reports Continued Learning Education (CLE) and Continued Education (CE) to various states. In the first half of my internship, I worked to analyze and document the current in-state system to understand the process and determine improvements to expedite processing information in this area. I talked to users of the system, customers and management to learn the process flow. I also worked with Microsoft Access to analyze the data flow and created reports to show where there were gaps in the current process.  I gained detailed knowledge on the functionality and usage of Microsoft Access databases and reporting tools through this experience. After designing a new, more efficient process, I presented my findings and recommendations to my supervisor.  I then assisted my team with implementation of the new process and ISOP was able to process CLE more efficiently.  The association was quickly able to process a large CLE backlog and avoid penalties from late processing fees.

During the second half of my internship with Accolade Management Services, I began the analysis of ISOP’s out-of-state process. Similar to their in-state process, I began with analyzing and documenting the current business processes related to the out-of-state business. After detailed analysis and investigation with stakeholders, I recommended a solution to improve this process area. The improvements included using a dynamic Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that maps out the unique process each state uses to approve and report CLE credits. I am currently still implementing these solutions and expect ISOP to have productivity improvements that will eliminate the current out-of-state CLE processing backlog.