Starting From Scratch

Maya Assurance Company was launched in 2006 to provide coverage for the limousine market in New York. “We began with a clean template,” says vice president K.J. Singh.

In its first year, Singh spent his time getting the basic IT operations in place, so going paperless was not on the top of his to-do list. Yet he also knew he didn't want to find himself in the same position as many carriers when they decide to go paperless: burdened with a decade's worth of legacy paperwork.

“Going paperless was on our radar from the get-go,” says Singh. “We identified the actual flow of the paperwork and the needs of the respective departments.”

After a decade in IT, Singh was familiar with many of the names in the document management world but found some enterprise solutions were just too expensive for a company as small as Maya.

“We researched a couple of articles about CabinetNG (CNG) and spoke with the company,” says Singh. CabinetNG provided Singh with a demo of its product, Shared Access Filing Environment (SAFE), and then a license so Maya could use the product in a real-world environment for a couple of weeks. “That helped us make the decision,” says Singh.

Maya is a small but expanding operation. The company began with three employees and has grown to 25 employees in just three years. Still, cost was an important factor. “CNG was more budget friendly and hit all our needs,” attests Singh.

Initially, Singh installed the SAFE system on one of the carrier's backup servers so users could get familiar with the product. Singh chose a staged approach to the rollout, going one department at a time, and the users loved it. Ultimately, buying a dedicated server was more of an infrastructure issue to keep the files secure and to be able to offer users a reasonable response rate, he notes.

As the volume of files increased, Singh added a dedicated server. He praises the tech support team from CabinetNG for its help. “We bought the hardware, specked it out, and [CNG] helped with the migration,” says Singh. “And it was flawless.”

One example of the product's value can be found in Maya's claims department, according to Singh. “If claims had to get a file copied for another carrier, it would take a half hour to an hour to find the physical file and maybe two to three hours to copy the file–sometimes we were looking at 500-plus pages,” he says. “Now, we have that down to five minutes.”

The Maya claims personnel can export a file for review, which Singh indicates is a huge cost and time savings for the carrier.

Insurance examiners can work much more efficiently and not waste time looking for files, processing files, or filing new documents, emphasizes Singh. “Everything is scanned into workflow,” he says. “It moves much more efficiently.”

Singh also points out the Maya underwriting department has only two people, yet they are able to manage around 2,000 files because the files are paperless and always available. “They couldn't manage that many [paper files],” he says. “That helped save [money] because we didn't need to hire additional people for filing.”

The SAFE system has improved Maya's operations in terms of efficiency and market penetration, reports Singh. “We are not wasting time looking for files,” he says. “When we want to get into a new market or product, CNG is right with us in helping to process the business.”

A side benefit of going paperless is the ability to eliminate a lot of wasted office space used for filing, potentially rearranging an entire office. “Before we had nine or 10 workstations, and now we can have 17 workstations in the same office space because we don't use all that space for filing,” says Singh. “As a growing operation, we are able to save a little bit on office space.”

Another benefit was putting Maya in higher esteem among the brokers and agencies that come to Maya to place business. “Not to rub it in to any competitors, but it makes the impression we know what we are doing,” says Singh.

Having just 12 to 18 months' worth of paper files made life easier for Maya, admits Singh. “We didn't have the burden of migrating hundreds of files,” he says. “It was a pleasant surprise working with this product, and we definitely are going to be leveraging its use going forward.”