In 1954, Frank Bloss and Earle Dillard founded a small insurance agency, working alone out of a one-room office. Since then, Bloss & Dillard, Inc., (BDI) has grown into a successful managing general agency (MGA) with 1,500 agents and thousands of clients in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

But success has its price, and for BDI, it came in the form of proliferating paperwork. As an MGA, BDI provides a broad range of insurance products to independent insurance agents. A staff of underwriters supports these agents by quoting and binding both commercial and personal insurance coverage, from simple property policies to highly sophisticated excess and umbrella coverage.

“We had over 7,000 insurance policies that our underwriters constantly needed to access, which meant multiple trips to our file room,” remembers IT/MIS Manager Tate Tooley. “We were constantly dealing with misplaced files, which cut into our ability to provide quality customer service.”

BDI realized that a digital document management system would not only eliminate these lost files, but would also improve customer service by enabling staff to immediately respond to agents’ questions. “We wanted staff to have all documentation at their fingertips,” Tooley says. “We wanted to store auto, property and excess liability documentation in the same place, so underwriters wouldn’t have to request information from another department.”

“Many of our clients had already switched to digital documents and paperless offices, so we were a little out of date with our paper filing system,” Tooley continues. “The key was to fit the new system to our current workflow, with minimum lag time during the integration process.”

After evaluating several systems, BDI chose Laserfiche®. “When we evaluated and ultimately chose Laserfiche, there were two main things about the product that really stood out,” Tooley says. “First, we liked having a local reseller that would assist us with implementation and ongoing support. Second, when our reseller, nCompass Networks, showed us Laserfiche, it was clear that we could take our existing paper workflow and mold Laserfiche around it. The competition gave us the feeling of ‘here is our system and how it works—adjust your workflow to make it fit with ours,’ and that isn’t what we wanted.”

Tooley also appreciated the Laserfiche system’s flexibility. “The Laserfiche software is very user-friendly and intuitive, unlike the other systems we reviewed,” he says. “And from the hardware side, Laserfiche doesn’t require multiple servers to run efficiently. We found Laserfiche runs very nicely on a mid-level server that also handles other processes in our office.”

BDI began their implementation by scanning 350,000 documents into the system, and, using the Quick Fields™ module, dramatically reduced the labor costs that would have been associated with such an ambitious project. Quick Fields automatically created the repository’s folder structure, filed the documents in the appropriate folders and then sent policies to the appropriate underwriters. Without Quick Fields, staff would have had to manually locate each folder after scanning it into Laserfiche. This automation saved 20 minutes per policy, resulting in over $23,000 in saved labor costs.

Since implementing Laserfiche, the firm has cut the amount of time necessary to issue a new policy from 10 days to three. Staff continue using Quick Fields to automate the scanning and sorting of monthly agent statements. Using Zone OCR technology, Quick Fields reads the account number and agent name on the statement and automatically fills in the matching template fields, and then files the statement in the appropriate agent’s folder. Audit Trail™ helps Tooley monitor actions occurring in the Laserfiche repository, tracking where a file was moved to, or if it was placed in the wrong location or improperly named, which he says tremendously minimizes the burden on IT staff.

Because there is only a single staff member supporting the company’s IT infrastructure, Tooley stresses that Laserfiche’s minimal IT support requirements are key. “From an IT perspective, the flexibility of the system’s security is excellent,” he says. “And it’s very easy to administer.”

Currently, BDI stores nearly a million documents in their Laserfiche repository—a total of almost 3.9 million images, ranging from scanned paper documents and electronic documents to photographs and e-mails. The repository has three main folder trees: one for policies, one for quotes and one for daily mail. Tooley uses access rights to give every user their own personal folder, where new policies are dropped for underwriters to review. Managers and supervisors can access each of their employees’ in-boxes to see their workload, which Tooley says makes it much easier to track workflow and the quantity of work completed. “But it’s not just important for supervision,” he says. “If an employee has any question about a file, both the supervisor and the employee can review the file simultaneously, even if they’re in different locations.”

As an MGA, BDI works with both the independent insurance agents who purchase policies for their clients and the insurance companies that provide the policies. By eliminating paper-based processes, Laserfiche helps staff provide both groups with more comprehensive customer service. “Handling documents electronically is much more efficient than handling physical paper,” Tooley says, “and having information right at our fingertips allows us to process quotes and policies much quicker than before.”

In the future, BDI plans to expand Laserfiche to the accounting department, as well as to implement WebLink™ to provide agents with access to documents—such as their monthly statements—through BDI’s Web portal. They’d also like to add the Workflow™ module to further automate their existing procedures. “Many people argue that the largest benefit of document management lies in the efficiency gains provided by workflow technology, and I wouldn’t disagree with that at all,” Tooley says. “Laserfiche has already made our office so much more efficient that I can’t begin to imagine what adding Workflow will do.”

Tooley appreciates the flexibility of Laserfiche’s modular design, which enables him to add functionality when needed—but he also stresses how well the system works, without requiring any additional modification. “At this point, we haven’t integrated any other applications with Laserfiche, and, believe it or not, we haven’t customized it at all,” he says. “We haven’t needed to, because Laserfiche works perfectly straight out of the box.”

“I have recommended Laserfiche to several organizations,” he continues. “When we decided to focus on technology, streamlining our work processes was the logical first step forward. As an IT director, I was relieved to have an easy to use and easy to administer system that improved our work processes without confusing our staff. And that’s something that works for any organization, regardless of industry.”

Tags: Audit Trail, insurance, Quick Fields, WebLink, Workflow

Posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 4:54 pm under Customer Stories, Financial Services. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.