The need to implement an imaging and document management solution at Illinois Mutual Insurance was captured succinctly by company chairman and president, Michael McCord, according to Bill Zimmerman, manager of information systems for the carrier. "Our chairman said this simply was the right thing to do," says Zimmerman. "We needed to move forward and be more advanced than some of our competition."

There were practical reasons, as well, notes Ed Zell, assistant vice president, information systems, pointing to disaster recovery as one example. "We could have lost all of our paper files [in a disaster]," he says. "Now that [the files] are images, we send them off site and will be able to recover a majority of our documents if we lose this building. It's not something you want to think about, but it's something you have to think about."

Illinois Mutual looked at three different imaging companies before settling on the ImageNow solution from Perceptive Software. What impressed Zell the most about ImageNow was when the vendor arrived at the carrier's Peoria headquarters to do the demonstration, it brought a scanner along, and within 10 minutes, the software was able to integrate with the carrier's mainframe system. "There were no programming or application changes on our part," says Zell. "That's what convinced me it was the right choice. They took a few documents, and in less than an hour, their product was able to understand our mainframe, scan in sample documents, and give us a demo of what it would look like once we were up and running."