Document management to the rescue
Published: 29 May 2002 09:46 BST
The first phase of the project involved entering records of all lost policies into the new document management system. Employees had to contact the insurance companies with whom they work and have them send paper copies of policies. Frenkel also used its Web site to encourage customers to mail copies of their policies to the company. As paper policies are received, they're scanned into the Fortis document management system. Frenkel has completed about 75 percent of this task, Hendrickson says.
The next step will be to capture images of all the normal workflow documents related to policies -- for example, documents sent out to clients and incoming correspondence -- and index and associate them with particular policies. To ensure that Frenkel is as efficient as possible when imaging its paper trail, the firm has recruited an insurance industry workflow consultant to document and standardise the steps its account teams take in completing various processes.
"The idea is to establish six or seven pieces of workflow -- for example, standardise on what tools to use to produce different documents, what steps are involved in producing a particular piece of work and how to scan incoming documentation," Hendrickson explains. "In other words, the best practices on how to image all paper... with the long-term goal to gain efficiencies by automating some job functions that were previously manual."
Beyond increasing efficiency, Frenkel expects the Fortis system to provide other benefits as well. Customer service should improve, because all policy information will be indexed and accessible from a central database. At the same time, Frenkel is better protected when employees leave, since all data is maintained in a common repository -- not in the heads or scattered files of transient employees, Marra says. And, of course, having all the documents in electronic form makes disaster recovery easier.
To streamline processing, Total System Integrators configured the Fortis system to interface with the cd.global database so key information such as policy-effective dates and policy numbers can automatically populate documents in the imaging system. Though Fortis depends on a client application to access the server software component, the Fortis front end runs on a Citrix MetaFrame application server so users can access the software via the Web.
So far, Frenkel has spent just under $500,000 on the project, including related hardware and consulting services. While it's too early to pinpoint specific dollar savings, Marra and Hendrickson say there is already clear evidence of a payoff. In particular, there is a significant savings on office space now that Frenkel has relocated its main headquarters to another location in New York.
"Manhattan office space is so expensive, and now we don't have to have space for a huge filing room," Hendrickson says.
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