While the rest of AFLAC was using upgraded document creation software, the IT department was saddled with an older version. We couldnt upgrade it because our software was at a stopping point, says Gentry. While business units prepared new documents, the IT department had to add the variable information to each document, transfer the documents to the mainframe, and build the logic in COBOL.

That meant the IT department also was piling up documents. Every little change or state variation had its own document, says Gentry. We had over 16,000 documents we had to manage. It was a nightmare. It took a lot of IT people to support the system. The entire [document] system was supported, in effect, by IT.

AFLAC knew what it wanted in a new system. We wanted to find something where we could throw document creation back to the usersthe business groups, says Gentry. We had to put our documents into a more manageable situation. We knew we had to get [document management] on the mainframe.

AFLAC began its search for a new solution at technology conferences. The company came up with a list of six vendors and performed a request for proposal, which whittled the list down to four. We went through an extensive evaluation, says Gentry. That involved bringing in people from the various business units to get their views. I didnt want this to be a product that just IT was happy with, she says. I wanted buy-in from everybody.

Each vendor was brought to the AFLAC offices in Columbus, Ga. The same AFLAC people sat through all four presentations, and the same questions were asked of each vendor. Everyone was able to vote and determine what they wanted, says Gentry. What they wanted was Dialogue from Exstream Software. The conversion process began in January 2002, and were still working on it, says Gentry.

Dialogue allows AFLAC to generate high-volume statements, on-demand marketing pieces, and interactive correspondence. Application development time is reduced through some of Dialogues features, including personalized communication, support to corporate CRM initiatives, and faster processing.

A team of programmers and business-unit personnel was formed for the project. As we prepare to convert an area, a business-unit person from that area is brought in to work on the conversion with the programmers, says Gentry.

One quick benefit for AFLAC has been to make the companys document inventory more manageable. To this point, weve decreased our document inventory by 80 percent, says Gentry. Before, we had a lot of documents we would just copy and change a few words or the form name. With Exstream we can make the documents the way they are used.

What impressed Gentry was how Exstream reacted when a major problem occurred. Our rules vanished on us, says Gentry, laughing today. The way the steps went, when a document got saved, the rules disappeared. We had to jump through some hoops to figure out what went wrong, but you can see what a vendor is really like when things like that happen.

Gentry says AFLAC looked beyond simply costs. We had to get our systems up to date and try to find a way to build our processes because we were outdated, she says.

Cost savings will come soon, though. Documents will be produced in a TIF format so they will no longer need to be rescanned to establish workflow. That will be a big cost savings, but for the most part, its the project turnaround stuff that has benefited the company, Gentry says. You cant really associate a cost with that.