Surprise Package

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Surprise Package

Robert Regis Hyle

Most off-the-shelf products offer clearly defined functionality for customers, but even the vendor was taken aback by what Penn National was able to accomplish with the solution.

Out-of-the-box functionality is what most companies seek when they implement a vendor solution, but sometimes outside-the-box thinking can make an implementation even more meaningful. Penn National Insurance discovered such hidden benefits when it implemented the Dialogue enterprise document solution from Exstream Software.

Tim Caskey, senior systems analyst with Penn National, explains his company has operated with three separate document solutions, and none of the three communicated with each other. “We were looking to consolidate those into one solution,” he says.

Some of the carrier's policies had to be put together manually because of the disconnect between the different print solutions. “We wanted to get rid of these three solutions, migrate to one, and be able to produce a policy automatically that doesn't have to be handled by a human,” Caskey indicates. “We wanted to get down to one document solution for anything we do. We wanted something we can plug into our enterprise and [use to] talk to any of our core systems–claims, policy, whatever it might be.”

Penn National works with Gartner and asked the consultant to provide a short list of vendors that could handle the carrier's document needs. It looked closely at four vendors submitted by Gartner, and during the testing and interview stages, the carrier's selection team kept a functionality matrix, an architecture matrix, and a cost matrix. “We just plugged in the rankings and looked at them when we were done,” says Caskey. “Functionality was 75 percent of what we were looking for. It also had to fit our architecture here.”

Cost always is an issue, particularly with upper management, but the executive team informed the selection committee cost of the product shouldn't be the final factor in its recommendation. “We weren't supposed to look at cost at all,” notes Caskey. “After we presented the results, it would be [upper management's] decision.” Near the end of 2004, the decision was made to proceed with the Dialogue solution.

The outside-the-box thinking came into play in the carrier's commercial lines, where underwriters could not get a document to work within the policy system. “[Business users] asked us to create the document in Exstream, and they wanted it integrated with the policy system,” reports Caskey. When underwriters hit file/print, they wanted to be able to get the document immediately into the policy file. What the IT staff did was trigger a process through a SQL table to set up a Microsoft Messaging Queue on the Exstream server to receive a message to process a worksheet for that particular policy. “We set it up on the Exstream production engine and ran a .NET application that monitored this queue, and when it got the request to do the worksheet, we actually launched Exstream in a real-time mode, created the document, output it to a TIFF file, and stuck it into our imaging system that the underwriters have on their desktop,” says Caskey.

That allowed the underwriters to open the imaging system and look for the worksheet to be in the policy, Caskey continues. “That sounds like a lot of stuff to do, but the worksheet was getting into our policy system in less than three seconds,” he says.

Most companies use Dialogue in a batch environment at night, but Penn National was handing the system one document at a time, having it run that document, convert it, and place it in the imaging system. What pleased Caskey was Penn National was able to solve this issue in fewer than eight weeks using just two full-time employees and another half-time employee on the project.

Seeing the results of this project, Caskey has been charged to meet with every department in the company this year, evaluate any type of document creation being performed, and come back with a recommendation for the 2007 budget of document issues the company can convert over to Exstream. “We can run checks or documents or whatever we want through this software,” says Caskey. “It's not specific for letters. There are not any limitations. We're doing different things.”