When someone asks you to think of a production line, what do youpicture? Perhaps you see complex machines building cars in hugefactories or robots assembling electronics in a clean room. Or, doyou think of old-fashioned, outdated processes like workersstanding on a line performing repetitive tasks? How can aproduction line support the insurance industry?

Consider all the documents that insurers handle every hour of every day.Now think of insurers' top priorities, like speeding new productsto market; ensuring accuracy, contract certainty, and regulatorycompliance; reducing costs; and improving customer service.Managing mountains of documents is an important part of achievingthese top priorities, but traditional enterprise documentautomation can be a real obstacle.

If you look at documents not just as data, but as a product thatneeds to be built—accurately, efficiently, and to exactingspecifications—then an assembly-line approach certainly has merit.The concept of the automated document factory elevates outdated enterprise document automation and turns itinto a system that is organized, consistent, searchable,controllable, and repeatable.

The automated document factory addresses, and eases, five keyinsurer pain points:

• Coordinating, managing, and optimizing increasingly varieddocument outputs
• Managing multiple systems and platforms
• Integrating information and processes across disparatesystems
• Meeting increasing expectations for "on demand" services
• Finding opportunities for transpromotion, cross-sell andup-sell

Using a Factory Approach

The automated document factory is an enterprise application thatmirrors a traditional assembly line. Each station, or factory"worker," has a specific job to do. As managers of the mostsuccessful businesses of the early 1900s knew, if a worker only hadto focus on one job, he/she could do that job quickly—optimizingproduction process and lowering costs. While the traditionalassembly line used a combination of man and machine, the automateddocument factory is fully automated, which adds agility and enablesinsurers to adapt to changing requirements. .

The roles within the automated document factory are asfollows:

• The Identifier recognizes new jobs and breaks them down intoone or more transactions.
• The Assembler retrieves key extract data from core transactionsystems (such as policy administration and claims systems) and usesthat data to assemble a document.
• The Distributor allocates the work load.
• The Batcher bundles the jobs.
• The Presenter publishes the generated output (print stream) tothe chosen printer or real time output such as an XML file, ane-mail or even a text message.
• The Archiver handles and delivers archiving requirements to theenterprise content management (ECM) system.
• The Publisher routes the print stream to the target printdevice i.e. printer.
• The Notifier notifies key constituents—such as publishingmanagers or even end user customers—that the output is ready fordownload or that the Automated Document Factory printed and maileda document.

Factory Roles

During any given day, insurers send a multitude of jobs to thefactory for publishing. The factory then delivers unique jobs tothe assembly line, which runs within the factory. There are manyways to configure assembly lines within the factory according towhat is most logical for each business. For example, an efficientfactory configuration for insurers would be to separate each lineof business (e.g. life, home, auto, commercial, health, etc.) andoperate each of them as production lines.

Finally, what's an assembly line without oversight? Twomanagement roles are assigned within the automated documentfactory—supervisor and scheduler. The supervisor controls theassembly lines to ensure efficiency; the scheduler ensures fullutilization of all resources. In addition, there is a third"manager" of the automated document factory—a common set ofpublishing rules that enable insurers to easily troubleshoot andidentify bottlenecks.

The factory stores all processing data in database tables,providing a full processing history, along with status updates,dashboards and analytics. The architecture enables true publishingintelligence across the enterprise, with unprecedented auditing andreporting capabilities.

What Makes ItUnique?

Several key features distinguish the automated document factoryfrom previous generations of publishing engines:

A scalable, secure multi-platform framework withfail-over capability for high-volume batch processing. Theautomated document factory is flexible enough to distribute outputin batch or real-time to different recipients for the sametransaction. This means that during the end-of-month crunch timewhen bills need to go out, the automated document factory can senda bill to an insurer's customer—ensuring optimal revenuemanagement—while scheduling a later delivery of a copy to the agentfor record keeping.

Simple, powerful and centralized troubleshooting,especially for multi-server, multi-componentimplementations. Centralized troubleshooting is asignificant time- and resource-saver for insurers. In the past, ifthere was a problem within a portion of a batch of bills, insurerswould have to reprint the entire batch, even if only 300,000 out of18 million bills had problems. The automated document factory'sreporting system can identify exactly which documents had errors,and why, and then reprint only the affected bills—keeping billingsmore on schedule even when unforeseen issues arise.

Enterprise reporting and businessintelligence. Easy-to-understand dashboards show reports,audit capabilities and performance metrics down to the mostgranular level for enterprise-wide document processing. Users candrill down into graphs and charts to find out how specific areas ofthe factory are performing.

Email and short message service (SMS) notifications ofcritical events. Whether reporting a problem or notifyinga customer that their documents are ready, the automated documentfactory can help ensure that every stakeholder knows a document'sstatus.

Standards-based architecture to supportintegration. Standards-based architecture enablesintegration of multiple input and output systems. From inserters tosorting, from bundling to hold-outs for audits, the automateddocument factory puts control in the insurer's hands.

Metadata. The database-centric enterpriseplatform enables storage of vast amounts of metadata that is, inturn, available for reporting, search and content repurposing.Metadata is critical business intelligence for insurers, whichsaves time and money.

Easing Insurers' Challenges

The automated document factory addresses, and helps ease, someof the major pain points of today's insurer. Let's explore some ofthese pain points and how the Automated Document Factory helps:

Multiple Environments: How to handle increasingly varieddocument outputs.

Insurers must deliver compliant, high-quality documents acrossthree different types of output—structured, such as printed bills;interactive, such as forms that require user input; and on demand,such as an annual policy renewal. Document automation of the pastfocused on structured documents; today's dynamic environment,however, demands more from automation. Insurers need to support alltypes of output with a single underlying system to driveefficiency, consistency and accuracy, regardless of the type ofoutput.

The factory not only supports structured, interactive andon-demand communications, but also provides unprecedented insightinto each of these environments. This insight helps managers easilyidentify and fix production problems or make changes to a singledocument, if needed. This capability improves business efficiencyand reduces the amount of time spent troubleshooting.

Multiple Platforms: Managing multiplesystems.

The typical mid-size enterprise has five to eight publishingplatforms that run the gamut from legacy print stream engines tomodern document automation solutions. Document automation becomesincreasingly complex with each line of business that an insurercarries, because, typically, each line of business has its ownsystems, and each system has its own publishing platform. Runningmultiple platforms also increases cost, and further complicates theprocess of compliance. In addition, these systems take control awayfrom the insurer, because there is no single, centralized pointfrom which to manage publishing across the enterprise

The automated document factory serves as a single,enterprise-level platform to manage all documents andcommunications. Rather than having to manage multiple systems thatdo one thing well (such as producing marketing brochures), but notothers (such as managing claims correspondence), a documentmanagement system with an automated document factory offers thebreadth of functionality to accept data from all of an insurer’ssystems. It creates all types of documents and then distributesthem to all channels. Special features, such as business rules andbuilt-in workflow, enable insurers to configure the system toperform specialized tasks without the need for manualintervention—truly a single-system solution for cost reduction,consolidation and efficiency.

Integration: Getting disparate datasources to "talk" to one another.

Traditionally, it was very difficult to integrate disparatepublishing systems with existing hardware and software; integrationrequired a complex spectrum of costly and time-consumingintegration methodologies. Integration now requires pullingreal-time data from internal transaction and core operating systems(such as policy administration and claims systems, among manyothers). In addition, it requires close integration with printersand other output devices and distribution systems (such as mailingequipment and software); archiving and record-keeping systems; anddata export to core systems or data warehouses. The automateddocument factory uses a standards-based architecture to integratenot only with an insurer’s internal systems, but also withexternal, third-party output providers. This flexibility greatlyreduces the time and cost associated with integration projects.

The Demand for "On Demand": Meeting increasingexpectations for real-time services.

Telling a customer to wait a week for a document is unacceptablein this need-it-now society. Customers want their information whenthey want it and how they want it, and they want real-time updateson any changes. On-demand enterprise publishing requires that theinsurer take what used to be a large batch job and break it downinto parts, delivering the components in real time. Claimsprocessing is an excellent example of the economic benefits ofon-demand communications: the faster an insurer can resolve aclaim, and the better the communication with the insured during theclaims process, the lower the final payout.

The automated document factory gives insurers the ability topull out communications from a batch environment and offer them toa customer via a Web portal, whenever the customer requests theinformation. This enables customers to do things such as get statusupdates on their claims, see the balance owed on their account, orperform other tasks that help increase customer satisfaction andcement the consumer relationship.

Transpromotional opportunities: Finding opportunitiesfor cross-sell and up-sell.

One of the few times an insurer gets to really "touch" thecustomer is via the billing process. Projecting a positive imagethrough this type of communication is crucial to ensuring goodcustomer relations. Effective communications drive both top andbottom lines. Top line: the insurer retains happier customers;bottom line: better documents reduce costs, such as customersupport phone calls. A happier customer is also much more likely tolikely to pay attention to transpromotional communications and takeadvantage of other goods or services.

With the granular, document-level insight provided by theautomated document factory, insurers can create highly targeted,transpromotional messages for every communication – for example,offering life insurance to a client who has recently reachedretirement age, or auto insurance to a family whose son has justturned 16. In addition, because the automated document factoryimproves the quality, efficiency and availability of customerdocuments, it will facilitate a positive customer relationship,which increases the likelihood of growing revenue with eachcustomer communication.

The automated document factory's production line approach drivesreal results to insurers—streamlining document management into asingle enterprise-level platform that enables cost efficiency,document accuracy and regulatory compliance, all while improvingcustomer service. With a level of automation unprecedented in mostof today’s point solutions, taking a factory approach to documentautomation can help grow both top and bottom lines for the insurerof tomorrow.

James Mullarney, CPCU, ARM, is senior director of productstrategy for Oracle Insurance. Susanne Hale is senior productmarketing manager for Oracle Insurance.