Consider Pacific Life Insurance-it implemented a document management system incorporating a FileNet optic storage, EMC disk management to provide redundant storage and images caches, and COLD storage and archiving of mainframe application output. Today, most of its service areas are fully imaged.
Pacific Life's return on its investment took five years; hard-dollar savings alone amount to $600,000 per year. Equally important are the systems' secondary benefits, such as productivity gains: They have approached 25 percent.

Evolving Document Management Solutions

Part of the challenge of choosing a document management solution is determining what the term “document management” actually means. “Some customers view document management as a process from start to finish,” said Albert Bonfiglio, vice president for CGI, which recently launched its own document management services operation to handle document printing and distribution for clients. “When they physically get a document in the door, they'll start to use some type of workflow package internally and externally. Other customers are thinking only about the end process of document creation-when they're starting to create a physical piece of paper.”

But even if an insurer chooses only to manage printing-or any other individual initiative level of the document workflow process-the result can be successful if the system is designed with future enterprise needs in mind.

“[Even with a] minimalist print definition…we can see distribution changes that can be made to streamline the process. From that you can grow into workflows, imaging, and other areas,” said Karen Furtado, CGI's vice president of consulting services. “You don't need to bite off the whole thing.”

“In the imaging and e-doc management world, you often see multiple systems across departments,” Macauley said. “But sooner or later these systems need to be supported and interfaced with your legacy systems.” Therefore, even if a departmental solution is the starting objective, an enterprise document management solution should be the long-term goal, or at least be considered in system requirements. “The day you put in [a content management system], it is a mission-critical system,” Macauley said. “You absolutely, positively, gotta have the docs.”

Component requirements of document management systems have remained essentially the same. However, document management technologies have seen significant changes and improvements over the past two years.

Global content management association AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) reports that key areas of improvement include increased scalability of document management systems, greater use of Web-based viewing and collaborative tools, and improvements in scanner throughput and image quality control. Systems have also increased their support of XML, which allows repurposing of a document's content to any number of print and electronic formats.

Systems have also become more approachable to business users. Scanners are turning up frequently in the workplace as components of copiers and fax machines, and familiar tools such as instant messaging, online meetings, and Web-based collaboration systems have been integrated with document management systems.

“[A] significant change in the industry as a whole is that users are becoming more knowledgeable about the technologies and the technologies are becoming more commonplace in the workplace,” said Betsy Fanning, standards director at AIIM. According to a recent AIIM study, imaging has been implemented or is currently being implemented by 60 percent of the respondents, with another 20 percent planning to implement the technology.

From Policy to Policyholder

For the most part, changes in document management technology have been defined by incremental improvements: faster, better, cheaper. But there have been some key shifts in document management strategy as well.

First, insurers have shown an increasing preference for prepackaged software and a tendency to choose insurance specialists versus horizontal document management vendors. “When I'm talking to [insurers], I'm hearing, 'We need to have the system up and running in 90 days',” said Kevin McKinney, industry manager for insurance at FileNet. “We're seeing [insurers] wanting more functionality out of the box.”

Second, within document management itself there has been a foundational shift from IT control of documents to author control, particularly as document management systems have become more approachable to nontechnical users. This latter feature allows multiple documents to be created for different formats, including the Web, from a single source file.

But perhaps the most significant change is that insurers are looking to document management as a tool to not only streamline document production and reduce costs, but also to improve customer relationships.

“What we saw when we brought out Calligo about three years ago was that customers were integrating it into their e-business platforms,” said InSystems' Ross Orrett. “They were using the technology to manage relationships with customers.”

As a result, InSystems shifted the focus of its document management platform. “We started building a whole set of extensions and in the last two years we've focused on extended relationship management, or XRM.”

By simply improving the production process-providing standardized print formats, speeding distribution, and reducing errors-document management enhances customers' perceptions of insurers. More important, by centralizing document storage and providing simultaneous access by multiple users, document management becomes a key component of relationship management. Document components can be recombined into custom proposals, targeted customer mailings, and policies. Carriers and agents can obtain quick access to customer documents for service and upselling efforts. And insureds can meet the self-service demands of policyholders, who are increasingly expecting full access to all documents, all the time.

Systems and Solutions: Storage

Centralized mass storage has been the traditional approach for document management, with magneto-optical devices as the systems of choice. However, the continued drop in price and increased performance of hard drives (to 80 GB and 15,000 rpm) and CD/DVD-ROM have made RAID systems and CD/DVD jukeboxes increasingly feasible for large storage needs.

The past few years have also seen the rise of network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs). In both NAS and SAN, divergent and distributed storage devices are added to an enterprise network-the primary difference being that SAN puts devices on a dedicated, high-speed network. In the NAS/SAN arena, Quantum (www.quantum.com) with its Snap Server and Maxtor (www.maxtor.com) with its MaxAttach have led the charge.

Systems and Solutions: Scanners

As with most technology, scanners have become faster, better, and cheaper over the past few years. Throughput has increased, with most high speed models pushing 200 pages per minute (ppm) “simplex” equating to 400 images per minute for duplex pages-in grayscale mode. Image and index quality control has also improved. But perhaps the most promising change over the last two years has been the introduction of color into high speed scanners, which can be important for insurers who need to capture print photographs of property risks and claims as well as for automating the identification of color-coded forms.

Currently, Kodak (www.kodak.com); Imaging Business Machines, LLC (IBML, at www.ibml.com); and BancTec (www.banctec.com) manufacture high-speed color production scanners. Kodak offers its models 3590 and 4500, the latter of which scans in 24-bit color at 150 dpi at the rate of 57 pages per minute and is designed for production environments handling up to 10,000 documents per day.

BancTec features its S-Series scanners that run at up to 70 ppm in 24-bit color. IBML provides the fastest throughput of the group, with its ImageTrac running at 108 ppm simplex color.

Systems and Solutions: Content Extraction

A scanned document is just an image. Getting information off the document and into an insurer's back-end system means either rekeying the information on the image-thereby mimicking the traditional paper workflow-or relying on intelligent character recognition (ICR) to decipher a document's content. ICR is the evolution of optical character recognition (OCR), which has generally been limited to interpreting machine-printed text. In contrast, improvements in ICR over the past few years have allowed it to recognize cursive handwriting as well as machine- and hand-printed text.

OCR and ICR are frequently packaged as a solution with scanning applications, particularly with workgroup systems-it is also available via vendor solutions such as Scansoft's Ominpage, CereSoft's FreeStyle, or Mitek Systems' QuickStrokes.

Accuracy of ICR depends on many document and image processing functions, including pre-processing to adjust page orientation, image cleaning, and decomposing the image into text and non-text areas-all of which have improved over the past two years. After processing, recognition engines using the latest neural networks perform lexical checking, assigning confidence scores, and accepting results based on predetermined tolerances.

Even so, the recognition achieved by current systems is not flawless; the systems still route failed documents for human interpretation. Because real-world ICR applications seldom exceed 80 percent recognition accuracy, some insurers are taking a nontechnical approach, forgoing automated ICR software in favor of outsourced data entry.

“One of our clients is scanning its application forms and sending them to India in a nightly batch,” said Ross Orrett, senior vice president of global relationship at InSystems, which provides document management and relationship management solutions to the insurance industry. Once applications are received, typists enter data based on the image file. “[Character recognition] is still not evolved to where it's completely automated,” Orrett said.

Another option is to not extract content at all. In fact, with many documents that insurers receive, there's little long-term benefit to extracting their content to a data repository. “Many processes in insurance, including underwriting and claims, call for a judgment. The more complicated the process, the more the need for human review, and the less the need for content management,” Macauley said. “Many documents are simply viewed and drop filed.”

Systems and Solutions: Workflow

Tying imaging, recognition, and storage/retrieval systems together are document management workflow systems. Among the many vendors serving the space are a number that are most frequently found in the insurance market, including FileNet, ImageRight, InSystems, and Docucorp.

Of these, FileNet (www.filenet.com) has perhaps the strongest presence in the insurance industry. It offers Panagon, a suite of document management products that includes COLD, imaging, electronic document management, Web content management, storage, automation, and workflow. It has recently developed Acenza, an out-of-the-box workflow system designed specifically for the property/casualty industry.

InSystems (www.insystems.com) provides Calligo, its flagship document automation platform for creation, management, control, and distribution of documents; FastForms, for automating electronic forms and applications; and Tracker, a workflow system that automates the insurance filing process.

Docucorp (www.docucorp.com) features DocuCreate for creation and imaging, DocuManage for management and workflow, DocuSave for archiving and retrieval, and DocuMaker for high volume, personalized document production.

ImageRight (www.imageright.com) focuses exclusively on the insurance industry, providing scanning, ICR, printing, and workflow within its self-named document management system. -MPV

Case in Point

When designing any document management system, insurers must decide whether-and how-to support the many manual, paper-based document distribution and receipt channels that their agents and policyholders have come to expect. An example of an insurance organization faced with a bevy of customer-required document formats is the Insurance Services Office (ISO).

ISO maintains one of the largest private databases in the world and each year collects about 1.5 billion detailed records of insurance premiums received and losses paid. Its data warehouse stores, on average, more than 6.1 billion active records. These records are used to produce manual pages, circulars, and filings that are printed and mailed; Web-delivered via its ISOnet service; and incorporated into electronic manuals such as ISO Suite, which uses Folio technology, to meet the various needs of subscribers.

Subscribers not only require different document formats for delivery, but for transmitting statistics as well. “We take information any way [insurers] send it,” said Domenick Yezzi, Jr., ISO's vice president of specialty commercial lines. “We still get some stats delivered on punch cards.”

For non-electronic transmission of stats, ISO has to rekey the information into its system. “We've tried scanning at different stages, but found rekeying was faster and easier than scanning and cleaning the results,” Yezzi said.

ISO uses a proprietary document management system that automates the creation, approval, and distribution process and results in simultaneous delivery of documents to a third-party printer as well as ISOnet and ISO Suite. While it has been supporting methods of electronic document distribution since 1991, ISO still created more than 70 million printing impressions in 2000. (This was a decrease from the more than 100 million impressions in 1996.) Postage and printing costs, which were nearly $11 million in 1997, have decreased to about $7 million annualized for 2001.

Michael P. Voelker is a free-lance writer with Equinox Communications in Cleveland, Wisc.