Document management to the rescue
Published: 29 May 2002 09:46 BST
The insurance brokerage, which, like many in its industry, was completely paper-based, began with a modest pilot program in its accounting department. Management questioned whether imaging technology could live up to its touted efficiencies and was concerned that users might hesitate to embrace such a system.
The moderate approach to deployment turned into an urgent initiative on September 11. Frenkel, housed on the 35th and 36th floors of Two World Trade Center, fortunately did not lose any of its employees in the disaster, but lost virtually everything else, including hundreds of thousands of documents and paper-based policies. "We lost every shared piece of paper we had," says Fred Marra, senior vice president and treasurer of the 250-person, $40 million company.
Forced to re-create all of its documentation, Frenkel management abandoned its controlled pilot and implemented a strategy most companies would never risk taking: wholesale deployment of a document imaging package to replace manual processes. "The thinking was if we had to start from scratch, we might as well start right," Marra explains. "If we stored paper files onsite again and had another event like 9/11, we'd be in the same place."
Based on prior evaluations of major document management applications, Frenkel selected Westbrook Technologies' Fortis document management system, which could be integrated with Delphi Information Systems' cd.global, Frenkel's insurance brokerage agency management system. Fortis also supported the Oracle 8i database already in use with cd.global, according to Bob Hendrickson, a consultant at Total System Integrators, a systems integrator in Berkeley Heights, N.J., to which Frenkel outsources all of its IT functions. Fortis captures, indexes, and distributes both paper and electronic documents and images.
With the software in hand in late September, the IT team began to rebuild Frenkel's central filing area. Within a month, the document management system was up and running in Frenkel's temporary quarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Instead of filling hundreds of square feet of prime office space with file cabinets, Frenkel began replacing paper files with a shared online repository. The repository, which runs on Hewlett-Packard LH 3000R servers, will eventually house everything from policy information to customer correspondence.
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