The following case study looks at a leading provider of specialized insurance and what BRT has done for them. This company sells its offerings exclusively through a network of independent agencies. An extremely effective recruiting program and unique set of product lines have resulted in rapid sales growth.

In just 17 years of operation, the company's offerings had grown to nine distinct products available in 22 states, and it faced a mounting information management challenge.

The company intended to accelerate growth by giving partner agents self serve access to its business systems and comprehensive policy documentation – a service not offered by any direct competitor.

Challenges

For years the company's agents were able to initiate critical day-to-day tasks only by contacting company representatives at the insurer's major offices in the Midwest and Southeast. With sales volume on a steady rise, this duplication of effort was becoming increasingly inefficient and burdensome for everyone involved.

The company's employees and agents were straining to process over 3,000 policy documents each day. Integrating and streamlining policy application and document processes would ease administrative headaches for agents and greatly strengthen relationships with them.

“With everything involved in preparing, printing, mailing, storing, and retrieving policy documents – and always in several sets of duplicates – it's easy to see how costly and time-consuming the process is”, says the company's chief information officer.

Real-Time Policy Information for Agents

The company's vision was to provide its agents with direct, real-time access to the legacy applications driving the sale and support of the specialized insurance company's policies. The aim: to save time and cost.

Business-Critical Needs

“We want to make it as easy as possible to do business with our company,” says the insurer's CIO. “It's an opportunity to build preference for our products and gain a decisive competitive advantage.”

Several copies of each policy document – including declaration packets, invoices, and cancellation notices – are printed each night. One copy is mailed to the policyholder, while another is packaged and mailed to the originating agent. With thousands of new policy documents generated daily, this had become an extremely time- and cost-intensive process. What's more, the insurance company's agents have been responsible for storing copies of these documents – an added burden for them; and a personal information management risk for the company.

The insurer is legally required to keep exact duplicates of all policy documents for seven years. This demanded another set of copies to be produced and boxed, then stored by an outside company. The insurance company recorded the content of each box.

“The biggest pain of all is often document retrieval,” notes the company's CIO. “Getting a particular document from storage could take several days, and getting the right document can be hit and miss.”

“This transition has involved more than just Web site and content management systems installation,” says Ed Tomaszczyk, BRT's chief executive officer. “It demanded behind-the-scenes integration of the insurance company's internal systems and business processes. BRT was tasked with delivering a comprehensive data- and document-handling approach that drives value across multiple dimensions of our client's business.”

Secure, Scalable, and Modular System

The information exchanged in a typical system inquiry or policy transaction is sensitive and private to each agent. Critical information and tasks are restricted to authorized persons.

As the insurance company continues to expand its product line and market reach, demands on its information applications will correspondingly increase.

Tomaszczyk of BRT explains, “The systems we designed and developed for the insurance company must provide scalable capacity to manage information on a steadily growing customer base. The systems must also be modular in design. Looking forward, the insurer expects to be able to accommodate significant changes in its business processes with only minimal changes to its computer systems.”

Fulfilling the Vision

Expert strategic help has come from BRT, Inc. -- a systems integration firm specializing in robust, scalable enterprise content management solutions. Working in collaboration with the insurance company's IT staff, BRT applied broad experience and a suite of software tools to simplify and speed the flow of policy documents and data between the company, its agents, and its policyholders.

“Our challenge,” says the insurance company's CIO, “was to provide an intuitive Web interface to our legacy WINS systems without having to recreate any business logic. We set out to provide a simple, reliable, and effective solution with zero implementation demands on our agents. The work that BRT has done for us has been essential to successfully leverage our legacy investments.”

Using the new BRT-developed applications, an agent can generate an insurance rate quote, issue a policy, collect payment, complete all relevant documents, and get these documents into the policyholder's hands – all over the Internet, and all in just minutes.

Tomaszczyk adds, “The imperative BRT addressed was end-to-end integration of products and services, documentation, and other strategic business components – all available on-demand. In this way, our client can optimize operational efficiency and dynamically respond to the needs of its customers and employees.”

A Quick, Clear Return on Investment

As a result of its new, integrated, Web-enabled content management system, the insurance company has achieved clear productivity gains. The insurer has dramatically reduced its document processing and storage costs while sparing its employees and agents a tremendous amount of time and bother in document handling.

“Being able to everyday service functions online is very attractive to our agents,” says the insurance company's CIO. “It requires no special software to be installed or configured on their internal systems, and little training. Within three months of implementation, agents were already conducting over 20% of the transactions with us through this interface.”

How the Solution Works

The Web-enabled solution delivered by BRT captures 3,000+ printed documents per day to digital storage for online search and retrieval through the insurance company's extranet.

Each night, the insurance company's systems produce policy documents for delivery the next day. After the documents are printed, a BRT-developed process converts the files to PDF format, assuring that documents can be viewed exactly as intended by any insured, agent, or employee on any workstation using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Next, a tailored BRT program queries the insurance company's policy management system to generate index information for the new policy documents. The program uses information culled from these documents to find more detailed policy information residing in company databases.

The PDF record documents and associated index information are then loaded into the content management engine. Initially, documents are stored in directly attached disk storage systems.

For internal users, direct access to stored documents is provided through a web client. Advanced users can create and save custom queries for frequently repeated document retrieval tasks.

Agents, meanwhile, find needed policy information through web client window launched from the insurance company's Web site.

After a predefined period, the documents move to an optical “jukebox.” Then, at the end of a document's lifecycle, index information is deleted and records can no longer be accessed.

Summary

The BRT applied their expertise in Enterprise Content Solutions implementation to digitally capture printed policy documents. The solution mines unstructured documents for implicit indexing information and exposes a content integrated AIGS WINS application interface securely via an Internet Agent Portal.

The new solution initially supported four specialty policy types, including Personal Auto, Homeowners, Business Owners, and Dwelling Fire.

BRT provides solution consulting, project management and implementation services designed to provide an efficient and easy-to-use web-based content management system. Call BRT at 248-324-9775 and see what we can do for your organization.