The automated document factory is an enterprise application that mirrors a traditional assembly line. Each station, or factory "worker," has a specific job to do. As managers of the most successful businesses of the early 1900s knew, if a worker only had to focus on one job, he/she could do that job quickly—optimizing production process and lowering costs. While the traditional assembly line used a combination of man and machine, the automated document factory is fully automated, which adds agility and enables insurers to adapt to changing requirements. .

The roles within the automated document factory are as follows:

• The Identifier recognizes new jobs and breaks them down into one or more transactions.
• The Assembler retrieves key extract data from core transaction systems (such as policy administration and claims systems) and uses that data to assemble a document.
• The Distributor allocates the work load.
• The Batcher bundles the jobs.
• The Presenter publishes the generated output (print stream) to the chosen printer or real time output such as an XML file, an e-mail or even a text message.
• The Archiver handles and delivers archiving requirements to the enterprise content management (ECM) system.
• The Publisher routes the print stream to the target print device i.e. printer.
• The Notifier notifies key constituents—such as publishing managers or even end user customers—that the output is ready for download or that the Automated Document Factory printed and mailed a document.

Factory Roles

During any given day, insurers send a multitude of jobs to the factory for publishing. The factory then delivers unique jobs to the assembly line, which runs within the factory. There are many ways to configure assembly lines within the factory according to what is most logical for each business. For example, an efficient factory configuration for insurers would be to separate each line of business (e.g. life, home, auto, commercial, health, etc.) and operate each of them as production lines.

Finally, what's an assembly line without oversight? Two management roles are assigned within the automated document factory—supervisor and scheduler. The supervisor controls the assembly lines to ensure efficiency; the scheduler ensures full utilization of all resources. In addition, there is a third "manager" of the automated document factory—a common set of publishing rules that enable insurers to easily troubleshoot and identify bottlenecks.

The factory stores all processing data in database tables, providing a full processing history, along with status updates, dashboards and analytics. The architecture enables true publishing intelligence across the enterprise, with unprecedented auditing and reporting capabilities.

What Makes It Unique?

Several key features distinguish the automated document factory from previous generations of publishing engines:

A scalable, secure multi-platform framework with fail-over capability for high-volume batch processing. The automated document factory is flexible enough to distribute output in batch or real-time to different recipients for the same transaction. This means that during the end-of-month crunch time when bills need to go out, the automated document factory can send a bill to an insurer's customer—ensuring optimal revenue management—while scheduling a later delivery of a copy to the agent for record keeping.

Simple, powerful and centralized troubleshooting, especially for multi-server, multi-component implementations. Centralized troubleshooting is a significant time- and resource-saver for insurers. In the past, if there was a problem within a portion of a batch of bills, insurers would have to reprint the entire batch, even if only 300,000 out of 18 million bills had problems. The automated document factory's reporting system can identify exactly which documents had errors, and why, and then reprint only the affected bills—keeping billings more on schedule even when unforeseen issues arise.

Enterprise reporting and business intelligence. Easy-to-understand dashboards show reports, audit capabilities and performance metrics down to the most granular level for enterprise-wide document processing. Users can drill down into graphs and charts to find out how specific areas of the factory are performing.

Email and short message service (SMS) notifications of critical events. Whether reporting a problem or notifying a customer that their documents are ready, the automated document factory can help ensure that every stakeholder knows a document's status.

Standards-based architecture to support integration. Standards-based architecture enables integration of multiple input and output systems. From inserters to sorting, from bundling to hold-outs for audits, the automated document factory puts control in the insurer's hands.

Metadata. The database-centric enterprise platform enables storage of vast amounts of metadata that is, in turn, available for reporting, search and content repurposing. Metadata is critical business intelligence for insurers, which saves time and money.

Easing Insurers' Challenges

The automated document factory addresses, and helps ease, some of the major pain points of today's insurer. Let's explore some of these pain points and how the Automated Document Factory helps:

Multiple Environments: How to handle increasingly varied document outputs.

Insurers must deliver compliant, high-quality documents across three different types of output—structured, such as printed bills; interactive, such as forms that require user input; and on demand, such as an annual policy renewal. Document automation of the past focused on structured documents; today's dynamic environment, however, demands more from automation. Insurers need to support all types of output with a single underlying system to drive efficiency, consistency and accuracy, regardless of the type of output.

The factory not only supports structured, interactive and on-demand communications, but also provides unprecedented insight into each of these environments. This insight helps managers easily identify and fix production problems or make changes to a single document, if needed. This capability improves business efficiency and reduces the amount of time spent troubleshooting.

Multiple Platforms: Managing multiple systems.

The typical mid-size enterprise has five to eight publishing platforms that run the gamut from legacy print stream engines to modern document automation solutions. Document automation becomes increasingly complex with each line of business that an insurer carries, because, typically, each line of business has its own systems, and each system has its own publishing platform. Running multiple platforms also increases cost, and further complicates the process of compliance. In addition, these systems take control away from the insurer, because there is no single, centralized point from which to manage publishing across the enterprise

The automated document factory serves as a single, enterprise-level platform to manage all documents and communications. Rather than having to manage multiple systems that do one thing well (such as producing marketing brochures), but not others (such as managing claims correspondence), a document management system with an automated document factory offers the breadth of functionality to accept data from all of an insurer’s systems. It creates all types of documents and then distributes them to all channels. Special features, such as business rules and built-in workflow, enable insurers to configure the system to perform specialized tasks without the need for manual intervention—truly a single-system solution for cost reduction, consolidation and efficiency.

Integration: Getting disparate data sources to "talk" to one another.

Traditionally, it was very difficult to integrate disparate publishing systems with existing hardware and software; integration required a complex spectrum of costly and time-consuming integration methodologies. Integration now requires pulling real-time data from internal transaction and core operating systems (such as policy administration and claims systems, among many others). In addition, it requires close integration with printers and other output devices and distribution systems (such as mailing equipment and software); archiving and record-keeping systems; and data export to core systems or data warehouses. The automated document factory uses a standards-based architecture to integrate not only with an insurer’s internal systems, but also with external, third-party output providers. This flexibility greatly reduces the time and cost associated with integration projects.

The Demand for "On Demand": Meeting increasing expectations for real-time services.

Telling a customer to wait a week for a document is unacceptable in this need-it-now society. Customers want their information when they want it and how they want it, and they want real-time updates on any changes. On-demand enterprise publishing requires that the insurer take what used to be a large batch job and break it down into parts, delivering the components in real time. Claims processing is an excellent example of the economic benefits of on-demand communications: the faster an insurer can resolve a claim, and the better the communication with the insured during the claims process, the lower the final payout.

The automated document factory gives insurers the ability to pull out communications from a batch environment and offer them to a customer via a Web portal, whenever the customer requests the information. This enables customers to do things such as get status updates on their claims, see the balance owed on their account, or perform other tasks that help increase customer satisfaction and cement the consumer relationship.

Transpromotional opportunities: Finding opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell.

One of the few times an insurer gets to really "touch" the customer is via the billing process. Projecting a positive image through this type of communication is crucial to ensuring good customer relations. Effective communications drive both top and bottom lines. Top line: the insurer retains happier customers; bottom line: better documents reduce costs, such as customer support phone calls. A happier customer is also much more likely to likely to pay attention to transpromotional communications and take advantage of other goods or services.

With the granular, document-level insight provided by the automated document factory, insurers can create highly targeted, transpromotional messages for every communication – for example, offering life insurance to a client who has recently reached retirement age, or auto insurance to a family whose son has just turned 16. In addition, because the automated document factory improves the quality, efficiency and availability of customer documents, it will facilitate a positive customer relationship, which increases the likelihood of growing revenue with each customer communication.

The automated document factory's production line approach drives real results to insurers—streamlining document management into a single enterprise-level platform that enables cost efficiency, document accuracy and regulatory compliance, all while improving customer service. With a level of automation unprecedented in most of today’s point solutions, taking a factory approach to document automation can help grow both top and bottom lines for the insurer of tomorrow.

James Mullarney, CPCU, ARM, is senior director of product strategy for Oracle Insurance. Susanne Hale is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance.