Handle With Care

However, Craig LeClair, a senior analyst with Forrester, believes the insurance industry still has work to do with ECM. "There has been good progress in establishing ECM at the department level within insurance companies," he says. "But it's still fragmented or siloed, so your submission process, your claims process, and your underwriting process may have implemented stand-alone content management solutions, but most of the efficiencies [of ECM] come from a cross-departmental access to content. [Without ECM] when you move content from one area to the other you either have to convert the data or access a different system. There's a lot of non-value-added activity at the boundaries of these siloed departments."

WORKFLOW NEEDED

Magna Carta Companies' initial foray into content management began with an imaging application written in-house for the underwriting department. What Magna Carta lacked was a workflow solution, at least until 2004 when the company purchased a solution from ImageRight.

Lawless reports the goal of the new system was to capture the work before it went to users and enhance the users' experience before the work arrived at their desk.

Imaging initially got the carrier immediate access to the files, so if a producer called and asked for particular information on a file, the file was always instantly available. What content management does for Magna Carta is give the carrier a handle on what the workload will be instead of what just happened. "We've switched from running our business looking in the rear-view mirror to looking out the windshield of the car," says Lawless. "The rear-view mirror was a great start, but you never really had a handle on your needs today. We now have a good handle on that."

One of the goals for medical malpractice insurer PICA was for the OnBase system from Hyland Software to help improve customer satisfaction. Mike Sole, senior project manager for PICA, explains that involved examining how the carrier made contact with its customers. "The typical scenario was doctors would call us between patients to ask about a policy," he says. "We would pull the paper file to answer their questions and then call them back. By that time, they were back with patients."

Now, PICA representatives are able to answer those questions right away. "There is no longer a disjointed process there," says Sole.

PICA also was interested in improving its processes, Sole adds. In claims, he explains, if an incident is reported to PICA, as part of the workflow process, rules need to be confirmed in order to begin processing the claim. "There are certain signed documents we are supposed to have, so we check to make sure the documents have come in," he says. If not, the system generates an e-mail to follow up. "We don't necessarily stop the setup of the claim; we notify [the insureds] so they can pursue those things," he says.

At Strickland Insurance Group, a commercial lines and nonstandard auto insurer, there was a lot of business coming in, but the majority of the carrier's processes were manual. "The business was growing, and we were seeing ourselves going down the road where inefficiencies–the paper, the handling costs, and the impact on customer service–were going to hurt us," says Greg Ricker, Strickland's vice president of information systems. "We saw the image products offered significantly more value, functionality, and flexibility."

Strickland had once owned an imaging system, but there was no workflow involved. "We made the decision image as a file store without workflow isn't something we're interested in," says Ricker. "Anybody can scan documents and put them in an electronic file cabinet, but it's the metadata about those documents that's important. We needed to know when things came in to a CSR, how long it was there before it went to underwriting, why it was sent to underwriting, how long it sat there, and what underwriting did when it was finished with it."

BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

In 2002, Strickland implemented imaging with workflow from ImageRight for its underwriting side and subsequently rolled it out to all departments in the company with the exception of HR. "We began to realize the workflow capability allowed us to improve business process," says Ricker. "We started tweaking and refining the workflow so it reflected all of the steps and everything underwriting, customer service, or claims was doing to the file."

Getting the workflow organized required a lengthy process of interviewing all the departments and reaching an agreement with all the steps. "Once we started to put those steps together, we were able to build a workflow. And if we connected our workflow to other data sources beyond the image system, we could bring more intelligence to our workflow," says Ricker.

Strickland also built an expert underwriting system with business rules that tied the system with workflow. As the document travels through the workflow, rules are enforced, and additional information is queried on the next steps and where the file needs to go, explains Ricker. Consequently, the carrier's workflow has continued to evolve, and the percentage of files the company is able to underwrite electronically has grown significantly. "The files that really need the attention get timely attention, and as a result, we are able to provide superior service to our broker clients," says Ricker.

UNDERWRITING IMPROVEMENTS

If a producer faxes a submission to Magna Carta, that fax is received electronically. The system recognizes who sent the fax–so it knows which underwriter should receive that task–and then the underwriter will act on that task. "There is no one person handing out tasks or running around with paper dropping it on your desk," says Lawless. "All that goes away."

When a new policy is issued by Magna Carta, a task is automatically routed over to the loss control department so an inspection can be made at the risk location. The underwriter no longer has to order an inspection. It seems minimal, but Lawless explains automating such a task took 15 to 20 minutes out of the underwriters' workload.

All of Strickland's policy and claims files are related. When employees open either a claim or policy file, they immediately see all the other files that are related to that file. "An underwriter may see there have been two or three prior terms, and he has links to them," says Ricker. The file also shows whether there have been claims on those prior terms, and it provides links to the appropriate claim files. "If you have four terms of a policy and three claims, if you open any of those seven files, they automatically point to all the rest," he says. "The underwriter doesn't have to go look for that information; it's just displayed. It really is for everyone within the organization."

MULTIPLE BENEFITS

Customer interaction is a challenge for insurance companies, asserts LeClair. "The level of personalization across products is not consistent," he says. "The level of detail on content and the brand elements are not consistent, either." Insurance companies need to take more of a client-focused approach as opposed to a product-specific approach, he suggests. "You should be able to retrieve content based on a customer profile as opposed to having to go into a specific product area a customer might be exposed to," he says.

Sole points out the benefits customers receive from the ECM system allow for better responses to policy questions, along with added functionality on PICA's Web site, which takes advantage of the workflow process.

When PICA undertook the ECM initiative, only four of the carrier's 65 employees had any imaging experience. "I anticipated a difficult transition, but we were able to make [imaged documents and forms] look exactly like the paper file," says Sole.

Configuration and setup of the OnBase system was easy for PICA despite limited development resources. "We were able to do the initial setup to get our claims operation up and live in about three months," says Sole.

Only new claims were entered into the system by PICA at first; all existing claims were initially kept with the paper files. "It got people acclimated into the system," notes Sole.

After users were on the system for two months, PICA redesigned its incident report using a Web form that does all the automatic setup in the carrier's administration system. "That eliminated a lot of the duplicate data entry," says Sole. PICA continues to tweak the processes, including putting applications on its Web site and automating the forms system to help the carrier's regulatory department.

ISSUES REMAIN

There are open issues around content management the industry and software providers continue to work on, indicates Ricker. Document security is one such example, particularly who has access to see documents, especially when dealing with credit rating for personal auto policies, he explains. "The industry is doing better at protecting and encrypting the data, and the technology providers are doing more to put security at the document level," he says. "It's not perfect, but it's getting better."

Ricker also remarks there are challenges around forms, including the ability to use standardized forms on a regular basis, being able to pull them up, flood them with policy data or relevant claim data, and then print-to-copy directly to the file.

Workflow is another area Ricker sees as evolving. "We are getting smarter about putting rules in the expert system and getting better at putting rules in the workflow to make sure we are routing tasks to the right people at the right time," he says. "If a task doesn't need a senior underwriter, let's not send it to a senior underwriter. If an underwriting assistant can do that, that's where you need to see it."

THE NAY-SAYERS

The reason some companies are staying away from a solution at the enterprise level is they invested in technology as a departmental solution and the solution is either functionally specific or narrow in functionality. "Let's say the claims department invested in a document management system that wasn't intended for the rest of the company, and then the underwriting department invests in another system," says Travers. "Hard as it is to believe, this goes on."

The two systems might be incompatible, and the company gets caught in a stalemate as far as getting rid of that technology and evolving to something that's enterprise class. "It's not that they wouldn't do it, it's just that they are stuck with old technology," says Travers. "There are some companies with battle scars that are wary of making further investments."

Travers maintains what really needs to happen is for carriers to step back and take a broader look at how to apply this technology across the information chain. "This is technology that can be used across several domains," he says. Carriers need to determine how they can redesign some of their processes and apply that technology to get more value out of it. "That's a big step for some companies to take–especially ones that don't have a lot of experience with that kind of technology," he adds.

The first thing that comes to Ricker's mind when contemplating life without an enterprise content management system is how a company can manage expenses and the business. "It's got to be much more labor intensive and expensive for those companies," he says. Many carriers get scared by the upfront costs and the license costs, but Ricker relates in the last market conduct review Strickland faced, the carrier was able to send regulators the files on DVDs. "We were basically able to drag documents out, create the electronic files, and send them to them," he says. "We could have given them electronic access to our system; however, they didn't want that. It was easy for us to give them the whole file in a timely and cost-effective way."

LESS DEVELOPMENT

Great American Financial Resources Inc. (GAFRI) approached content management from both a technical and a business standpoint, according to Bill Arney, solution architect for the company. To do anything on the company's old document management system required development time by GAFRI's IT staff. "What attracted us to [Hyland Software's] OnBase was the workflow module was GUI driven," he says. "It allowed us to shift our resources from a programming standpoint to more of a business analyst. Our turnaround time on delivering solutions decreased. We deployed workflows in much less time than before."

Arney affirms business users today are getting more functionality from the system than ever before. "We've got a lot more integration points than we had before," he says. "We were used to having a paperless system, but what we're doing now is improving our processes. We're growing, and the goal is to grow the business while streamlining and improving our processes so we don't have to add resources."

GAFRI had workflow capabilities before, but Arney points out the system built queues, and the only thing a user could do in the queue was route things to the next place or put the task on hold. With OnBase, though, the carrier can build whatever kind of task it wants. "We went from basic workflow to more integration with our line of business and other applications," he says. "It streamlines things and allows us to take steps away from the end users."

The new system also allows GAFRI more ways to get information into the system. OnBase integrates with the e-mail application, which allows users to import e-mail into the content system. "We were mainly on a document management system before," says Arney. "We're able to get a lot more content on this system."

NIGHT AND DAY

Gordon Ching, director of IT for CSE Insurance Group, describes the differences in the carrier's business operations as "night and day" once CSE invested in a document solution from Skywire Software. "Our automobile declaration page was COBOL based, so all the coding was cumbersome to modify documents," he says. "To make even simple changes required a week's worth of programming and, on top of that, the time it took to move into production and verification." Skywire's iStream solution doesn't require a technical programmer. A business analyst with a technical background now can create documents using Microsoft Word.

Having a content system also allows CSE to include all the attached documents that go with its declaration page. "Most insurance companies have a number of endorsements, and each is like a mini contract and requires you to attach it to the declaration page as proof of coverage," says Ching. "We had a separate department that actually handled that–manually inserting them after determining what documents were called for." That process is now electronic. "We programmed it to print along with the declaration the required endorsement," he says. "The program determines what's called for and moves on."

The workflow process also allows CSE to pay closer attention to new policyholders. "We are able to customize the package," says Ching. "We dress up a welcome package, whereas the policyholders who are renewing are all automatic right off the high-speed printer, the mail inserter, and out the door. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 policies are sent out each day, and 98 percent of them are no longer touched by anyone."

WORK TO DO

There is no doubt in Ricker's mind ECM has fulfilled its promise of simpler access to content. He recalls a time when he worked for one of the largest insurance carriers in the country, and the carrier wrote, developed, and implemented a bar code system for accounts. The accounts would be scanned as they went through the building.

Today, life is significantly more efficient, and carriers provide much better service. "When you pull that file, you can look at tasks to see which are pending; you can look at the file notes from the underwriter or claims; you can put a supplemental information sheet in that has a summary of all the prior terms for that account," says Ricker. "It has exceeded our expectations in terms of being able to provide an exact kind of access."