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."
The decision to purchase an imaging solution was made in the fall of 2004. Illinois Mutual went live with its first department–the sales administration group–in February 2005. "It is kind of a stand-alone group in terms of the documents it uses typically aren't needed throughout the building," says Zell. "We bit off a little piece and got our feet wet."
Perceptive assigned implementation consultants to Illinois Mutual who came on site to work with the carrier. Illinois Mutual's implementation team consisted of four people from within the carrier–two on the technical team (Zell and Zimmerman) and two business unit leaders to do the user administration. The consultants went over the carrier's hardware list and began working with sales administration to design a workflow to meet the unit's work environment. "[The consultants] helped take the manual processes and put them into a workflow so the documents could move smoothly," says Zell.
Zell describes ImageNow as intuitive software. "The learning mode allows the system to understand things about Internet Explorer applications and Windows applications–just about anything you are running," he says. "One of [the vendor's] big selling points is its learn mode. The last thing we wanted to do was change applications just to fit this in."
Illinois Mutual implemented a major upgrade to ImageNow in November 2007, and Zell indicates business users had to adapt to a changing workflow. Most issues were addressed in short order, he relates. "Now that we are on it, it's been rock solid," he says.
The initial challenges Illinois Mutual faced in adopting an imaging solution involved resistance to change among the business users. "Some employees did not like the fact they couldn't hold that claim jacket in their hand," says Zell. The carrier ended up placing dual monitors on most of the desktops so the users could have their traditional application on one screen and the imaged document on the other. "It was an expense we hadn't planned on, but that helped alleviate some of their concerns," he recalls.
The carrier didn't have any space problems at its home office, but Zimmerman reports it has recaptured a large amount of square footage that had been dedicated to paper files. "Through these efforts we are on the verge of moving people into that space," he says.
Some carriers have been able to reduce head count by adopting an imaging system, but Illinois Mutual chose to reallocate the human resources to other positions. "That was a cultural thing here with Illinois Mutual," says Zimmerman. "We are a small company, and terminating an individual because we were more efficient was not something we wanted to do."
"We found other things for those folks to do," adds Zell. "We are able to process a lot more business with the same number of or fewer people. [The solution] has been a savings to us in that we didn't have to go out and hire more staff."
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