It didn't take Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Co. 100 years to realize changes needed to be made in how the company handles workflow and business processes. But if the company was to reach any more meaningful anniversaries, then change had to be embraced.
"That's reality," says Martina Latimer, manager of content management for Grinnell, which celebrated its centennial in 2009. "You need to be able to change in business, or you won't be here another 100 years."
CIO Dennis Mehmen believes Grinnell's problems were typical of many insurance companies, particularly of late. "We wanted to eliminate the need for additional staff, so we were looking at our workflow and handoffs to see what kind of efficiencies we could come up with and basically do more with fewer people," he says.
Grinnell also wanted to eliminate the risk of missing documents–particularly when people were out of the office–and to be able to deal with disaster recovery and document retention. 
Before the OnBase project, Grinnell had another software solution for electronic document storage and workflow. It was using the solution to store documents, Mehmen explains, but was having difficulties with the complexity of the system.
Latimer was hired to take on a new content management project, and the first step was to determine whether the vendor already in place had a solution that could solve Grinnell's problems.
"We're located in the middle of Iowa, so the IT resources of the caliber we needed were not available," says Latimer. "With that solution, we needed a lot of Java architects, and I didn't think it was feasible. That's a challenging position for us to fill."
Instead, Grinnell chose OnBase from Hyland Software. The company decided to begin implementation in a smaller department with about 25 employees.
"We thought it would be a good place to start to get people here familiar with how it works and to hire my staff and get them on board with what we needed to do," says Latimer. "We went live about eight months after the purchase. During that time, we had to convert about nine million documents from the old system to the OnBase system."
Getting all the documents in place was the first big challenge for the solution. "[Hyland] made us a promise it could get it done by the deadline to get us off our old contract," Mehmen says.
Grinnell had been paying maintenance costs with the old contract, adds Latimer, so the company realized it would have a good return on its investment if Hyland could make that first date.
"That was a challenge, but it made its first goal; and that was a great start to our relationship with [Hyland]," says Mehmen.
Latimer and her staff went through a four-month training mode, starting in early 2009 with the underwriting department. "We did some investigation and then went off and did an actual upgrade with OnBase for some more functionality," she says.
The meetings concerning underwriting were held daily for about five weeks, Latimer recalls, with up to 15 people contributing information from both the content management team and the underwriting staff.
"We went live Aug. 1 with our underwriting department, which is about 200-plus people. Probably 90 percent of the processes now are paperless and in the workflow,"
she says.
Latimer's staff took on the task of not only looking at the processes but making them consistent, she adds. "We have personal lines and commercial lines, and we have regions between all of them, so there was a lot of inconsistency," she says. "We made [the processes] consistent and changed some of them. We not only automated the workflows, we looked at changes for the business, too."
But by eliminating so many human touches, Grinnell created a separate problem that had to be dealt with–maintaining the company's strong customer-service focus with agents.
"Our agents are used to us holding their hand day in and day out," says Latimer. "We have refined a few things such as communication to our agents just to keep the warm-and-fuzzy feeling. A lot of that involves notification of items we are sending out."
The system has helped them learn more about their business. "We had no idea how much communication we got electronically," says Latimer. "We get about 75 percent of our communication from our agents electronically, and [management] thought it was the opposite with more [snail mail]."
– Robert Regis Hyle
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