10 Steps To Becoming Nearly Paperless

Step 1: Assess how documents impact your business.

Workers spend up to 30 percent of their workday looking for information in documents. It is a competitive advantage to make that time more productive and less costly. Take the time to assess how documents are created, shared, stored and accessed throughout your organization.

Step 2: Review current processes.

Once the value of the document is understood, its important to review the current workflow of the organization. Are employees and producers spending valuable time authoring, editing and printing documents that become outdated within a few weeks? Can employees access the documents they need at the exact time they need them? Are obsolete documents taking up space in a warehouse?

By understanding where knowledge exists and how it is transferred, the organization can identify inefficiencies before implementing technology, ensuring a return on investment.

Step 3: Evaluate customer communication.

Insurance organizations can impact their bottom lines tremendously by communicating more effectively with customers. When you consider that 90 percent of customer communication is through documents, the content and distribution of these documents is vital to the way the company wins and keeps customers. Survey your customer database to determine how to best get through to your customers. Do they understand current brochures and product information? Would they be more receptive to personalized information targeted specifically to their needs?

By better understanding the needs of your customers, you can adapt your document processes accordingly. For example, if customers desire more personalized communication, it may be in the best interest of your organization to digitize customer forms so that they can be altered and printed in real time to meet individual customer inquiries.

Step 4: Understand technology options.

Advances in office technology are bringing enterprise-level functionality and quality to small and midsized agencies. Multifunction devices that combine functions like copying, printing, scanning and faxing are now offered at a price range to fit every budget. Combining software programs and XML tools with these devices enables faster routing and comprehension of the information within documentssignificantly decreasing time spent on the policy application process.

Using these devices to replace and consolidate old hardware will help your organization save on supply and maintenance costs, as well as reduce the downtime often associated with outdated equipment.

Step 5: Break free from your documents: Outsource.

Documents play a critical role in the day-to-day activities of an insurance organization. Yet evaluating document content and managing document output is not typically part of an insurance agents job description. Assess your document management needs and consider outsourcing as a way to free up time for the core of your business: keeping customers happy.

Step 6: Bridging the digital and paper worlds.

The goal is not to make paper obsolete, but rather to find a way to efficiently use the amount of information we have. Coupled with software and services, you can utilize networked multifunction devices as a portal between the paper and digital worlds. Employees can distribute documents via e-mail and print or fax from the comfort of their desks.

Additionally, the ability to scan hardcopy documents to the desktop, store them and then share them with others offers a powerful solution to agents and employees who are used to searching in file cabinets for hours or even days for a specific document.

Step 7: Scan for business continuity.

Planning for disaster is top of mind for businesses across all industries. In the insurance industry, having a back-up plan for retrieving critical information is a necessity as regulations require more and more documentation.

To meet this need, it is not only important to digitize documents through scanning and indexing, critical files should be stored off-site in a repository. This allows documents to be accessed from multiple locations.

Step 8: Managed services.

Adding managed services for your technology investments helps ensure the changes you are making are having an impact on your bottom line. Integrating on-site support, or utilizing off-site hosting services, allows for continual evaluation of the success of your daily operations. Consider a third-party consultant to manage what your employees dont have time formeasuring the impact of document content, evaluating the number of documents being produced, even product maintenance to keep downtime to a minimum.

Step 9: Implement a cultural change.

Companies spend billions on technology investments without ever considering the impact it will have on employees. To ensure ROI when implementing new technologies, it is important to consider work habits and cultural norms that will be affected. Hold training sessions to ensure that employees understand how the implementation will integrate with current processes and technologies.

Step 10: Measure ROI.

By following the nine steps above, you will have created a framework conducive to measuring ROI. Evaluating productivity and costs before making technology decisions, considering cultural implications and continually assessing the success of the new technology and services will all help determine the most effective ways to decrease paper within your organization. With better management and control of documents and the information they contain, your organization can reduce overhead costs by more than 40 percent.

Julie Dorey is vice president, insurance and financial services for Xerox Global Services, based in Rochester, N.Y.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, November 7, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.