Background

Founded in 1882, our client is a leading provider of commercial, specialty and personal insurance to customers worldwide. Our client ranks among the Top 10 publicly traded insurance organizations, based on revenues, in the United States. With more than 10,000 employees throughout North America, Europe, South America and the Pacific Rim, our client serves property and casualty customers from more than 132 offices in 33 countries. Our client works closely with 5,000 independent agents and brokers worldwide.

Business Challenge

The insurance industry is currently undergoing a high degree of change. Carriers are challenged to post an Underwriting profit. Government deregulation is enabling new competition from traditional Financial Services companies, who are now able to market products to their customers which in the past, had only been available from Insurance companies.

Fierce competition, product commoditization and catastrophic losses are increasing pressure on eroding margins. Leading companies are exiting unprofitable business lines and streamlining expenses. At the same time, agents, brokers and consumers are demanding specialized products, high quality services and access to information from any location, using any medium at any time. Accordingly, carriers are leveraging information technology to:

• Reduce costs because the bottom-line counts now more than ever
• Increase efficiency by streamlining and automating manual processes
• Improving productivity
• Create new demand for products
• Enhance services to keep one step ahead of the intensifying competition

Objectives

Our client needed to integrate existing fax servers so that all incoming faxes would be received and routed to a centralized document management repository. Furthermore, our client needed to have the fax index information automatically stored on the document when it was filed. In addition, our client required a robust Lotus Notes integration to allow users to add incoming and outgoing email to the document management system. Finally, our client also had the need to implement a distributed and easy to use imaging solution.

Technical Solutions

Sitrof Technologies, Inc. was able to build a system that met all of the user requirements. The system consisted of a .NET architecture with HTML/LotusScript, and Visual Basic user interface. The applications connected to and retrieved the documents from a newly implemented document management repository. Faxes came in through their Zetafax Fax Gateway Server and routed to the inbox in Lotus Notes. Users were able to select one or more e-mails/faxes from a desired folder. The users select an integrated menu option, prompting with an input screen. The screen is used to classify (document type) the emails/faxes and enter any relevant metadata required from the document management server. Sitrof also customized and implemented their scanning solution and integrated a document classification/acl schema to the chosen document management server in accordance with the user and functional requirements specification.

Results

Our client is now able to eliminate most of the paper documents in their process and have web-based access to all their documents on time and without problems. What used to take minutes or hours now takes seconds. They are now confident that all the documents are sent to their customers and if any problems do arise, they can respond in minutes as opposed to hours and days. The project was completed on time and within budget.

Background

The Public Employees' Retirement System was established in 1955. The Division of Pensions and Benefits is assigned all administrative functions of the retirement system for investment.

Business Challenge

To redesign and develop a workflow system to be used by the Division of Pensions and Benefits to process the purchasing of retirement time. The original system had become old and outdated and was no longer going to be supported by FileNET. This system, originally developed using the FileNET WorkForce Desktop 4.0 scripting language, needed to be rewritten to use the latest FileNET Visual WorkFlo.

Objectives

• Redesign and develop a workflow system to manage the retirement process of municipal and state employees.
• The new system required a tight integration to the IBM Mainframe, Oracle Databases, and UNIX FileNET imaging repositories.
• A sophisticated automated letter creation module was required for correspondence to state employees.
• The new system had to be Y2K compliant.

Technical Solutions

Used FileNET Panagon to develop a client-server based solution.

Application

Customized application interface containing all of the needed information for the Purchasing group to process their work. It included imaging which allowed the user to access documents scanned in as well as storing correspondence printed from the custom letter generation service. The applicant would start the process by submitting an application which would generate a work object. As the work object traveled through the workflow, different users would interact with the data. In the event of certain flags produced by that interaction, the system would automatically generate correspondence which was printed on a nightly batch process server. Once the applicant was approved a form was generated and sent to the payroll department so that they could begin deducting the agreed amount from the applicants biweekly or monthly pay checks.

Tools

Visual Basic for customized components. FileNET's IDM Desktop API's and Visual WorkFlo.

Results

• Applicants are now reviewed and approved 50% faster.
• Fewer mistakes are made during the process.
• The administrator now has the ability to reassign workload to different users decreasing the bottleneck when someone is out on sick leave or vacation
• Users now have timely access to the documents needed to process the work.
• Pre-defined from letters can be pre-populated from the applicant's information as stored in the FileNET System.