By reducing preprinted forms, ID cards, and storage facilities for tons of paper documents, insurers that dont click the print icon are saving trees and much more.

Insurance carriers are notorious for the amount of paper they generate, and even smaller carriers such as Commerce West Insurance substantiate that reputation. We generated thousands of pieces of paper every day, says George Jeffers, Commerce Wests director of IT. And were fairly small in the insurance world.

Commerce West operated on a proprietary printing system, and Jeffers describes the printing methodology as somewhat archaic. The carrier found it was difficult to control both the look and feel of the pages produced for policies, bills, and customer information. There was no mechanism to do anything except to print a hard copy, he says. For everything we printed out, we would print a copy for the insured, a copy for the insureds agent, and a copy for our internal use. It was an intensely manual process. We had a lot of problems with speed and quality.