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A life insurer needed to shorten its time frame for getting quarterly reports into the hands of its customers.

For Kansas City Life Insurance, and most insurance carriers, quarterly statements must be mailed to policyholders within a strict time frame. Before we implemented the Solimar software, we had many time-consuming constraints that caused problems with generating and completing [the reports] on time, says Al Ramirez, operations manager for Kansas City Life. The process typically was completed in approximately three days. If we had problemsthe printer went down or somethingwe were cutting it pretty close to get them out on time, he continues. We still have a five-day window, but now were getting the reports out in two days. Were pretty comfortable right now with how its working.

Kansas City Life wanted to find a solution that was easy to implement and not cost-prohibitive, according to Ramirez. He adds it had to be usable for many other printing projects, as well.

We evaluated other products/technologies that could have been beneficial, he says. The different processes we came up with were passed on to the managers of our specific areas, and they made the choice on which process was best suited for our problems. The managers chose [the Solimar] implementation for our solution because it was integrated easily with our existing software/hardware, and support for the software already was available.

Kansas City Life has been using the Solimar Print/Director solution for about three years, states Ramirez. The iCONVERT capabilities were adopted last year. As far as the programming went, the installation was transparent to the users, he says. The process now is automated, and it alerts the operators when the projects are ready to be printed. There was minimal training for the printing, and the users reacted with surprise and understanding.

The solution has worked out wonderfully so far, Ramirez attests. The users are excited by how much time and effort the new implementation has saved, he affirms. The errors that occur now are minimal and can be remedied easily. Specifically, our customer services people have been able to request and retrieve documents much faster and much more reliably than before. This saves them time when sending the statements to our agents in the field.

The product has helped Kansas City Life become more efficient when dealing with its agents and customers, asserts Ramirez. For the larger strategy, this implementation is one step closer to delivering on-demand information, he says.

Ramirez points out for one project in particular, Kansas City Life was able to see processing time decreased by 75 percent with use of the Solimar software and hardware. With the new process, the carrier can complete printing in 18 hours. The Solimar software as a whole is very user-friendly, allowing us to create as many job-specific paths as we need in a short amount of time, he notes.

The carrier still needs to do end-user training to get the whole process to continue to work smoothly, Ramirez indicates, but, he adds, there have been minimal errors. After the process was in production, we met again and discussed small changes that could be made to help eliminate and alleviate problems and errors, he says. We have not had to find any workarounds to problems weve encountered. Many of the problems were minor and required little or no changes.

PDF documents of the statements are created programmatically and sent to the Solimar queue for printing over the network, Ramirez explains. The Solimar queue bundles the incoming files and prints when the job is released. Since the system is able to print PDF documents, many of the carriers report documents now are being converted to PDF. This approach also simplifies archiving the results of the reports for easy retrieval.

We feel this implementation was special because of the sheer volume of printing that gets done on a daily and especially quarterly basis, comments Ramirez. Every quarter, we are able to process, print, and distribute thousands of quality statements in a fraction of the time it took before the implementation. The investment has paid for itself in manpower savings.

ROBERT REGIS HYLE

Case File
THE PROBLEM
The time needed to print and
mail quarterly statements needed
to be reduced.

THE CARRIER
Kansas City Life Insurance
Web Site: www.kclife.com
Total Assets: $4.6 billion

THE SOLUTION
Print/Director and iCONVERT from Solimar Systems, Inc.
Web Site: www.solimarsystems.com