If you’ve ever enrolled in an employer-sponsored voluntary insurance program, you know all about the stacks of paper that come with. It’s easy then to imagine the massive volume of paperwork that companies such as Seattle, WA-based Administrative Systems, Inc. (ASI) process behind the scenes. As a voluntary benefits administration firm, ASI handles thousands of documents every day for employers, carriers and other employee benefit providers. And now, thanks to their Laserfiche system, ASI staff are enjoying a few benefits of their own—reduced processing times, simplified compliance and faster access to information.

ASI has long recognized the business benefits of technology, having installed a competing document management system in 2001 to manage insurance applications. According to Vice President J.T. Perry, the old system performed admirably, but lacked the functionality to support future business growth. “At first,” he says, “we just wanted to image insurance applications and index them by the applicants’ account numbers. Our previous system worked fine for that, but it didn’t promote extra efficiency.”

Indeed, just inputting information into the system required two full-time staff members, devoted to scanning documents one at a time. Furthermore, ASI anticipated the need to assign additional metadata to documents, in case a staff member didn’t have an applicant’s account number handy. “We couldn’t tag documents with information like the applicant’s name or which agent signed them up,” Perry explains. “This restricted search capabilities and hindered development of any kind of workflow automation.”

The problems weren’t limited to inefficiency, either. “Our old system didn’t have very many built-in compliance features, because it was developed before Sarbanes-Oxley, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and other regulations were enacted,” Perry adds.

Ultimately, compliance was the impetus for switching to Laserfiche. After three months of due diligence failed to yield any results, ASI found their answer close to home. ”Our sister corporation, NFP Securities, Inc., has a large Laserfiche installation, and they face many of the same compliance issues as us,” Perry says. “They suggested we take a closer look at Laserfiche, because it works so well for them. We measured Laserfiche against many of the same compliance metrics that NFP uses, and it stood up better than anything we’d seen.”

While some first-time Laserfiche users need time to warm up to their new systems, Perry did so without hesitation—and so did ASI staff. Laserfiche brought them many new features, such as redaction tools, e-mailing directly from Laserfiche and drag-and-drop e-mail archival. “Previously,” Perry says, “we had to print e-mails, then scan them back in—which is really pretty silly, when you think about it.”

In addition to eliminating unnecessary scanning, ASI have made the remaining scanning much more efficient by using Quick Fields to automatically index imaged insurance applications. Staff simply sort documents by type, then insert separator sheets between the document stacks before loading them into the scanner. Using Zone OCR, Quick Fields reads the contents of the separator sheet to determine where to index the scanned documents.

Since the company’s founding in 1990, ASI’s proprietary software systems have become the backbone of their administrative services—and integration with Laserfiche has only made them more powerful. Because most insurance applications are handwritten, staff must read their contents and apply metadata manually. But now, when they enter information into their primary insurance software, the integration automatically applies that information to newly-scanned documents as Laserfiche template fields. This eliminates the need to enter the same information twice and gives staff more ways to search for the documents they need.

It’s a fairly simple integration—and such simplicity is part of what makes Laserfiche so attractive to ASI’s IT department. “Laserfiche is very powerful,” Perry says, “but it’s also very simple, from both a user and a technical perspective. We only needed six or seven hours to complete the integration. A colleague and I sat down and knocked it out—it was amazing.” Perry looks forward to further integrating the two systems so that staff can search the Laserfiche repository from their primary-use applications.

They’ll also use Workflow to automate their business processes—which would have been next to impossible with their old software. “Currently,“ says Perry, “after data entry’s complete, documents go right to their final destination. We’ll configure Workflow to route the new documents into our quality assurance process first.” ASI’s Laserfiche reseller has helped them set up the workflow, which they’ll enter into production within the next six months.

Because Quick Fields captures documents to the Laserfiche repository right away, staff can provide more responsive client service. As Perry explains: “If an insurance agent comes in and asks, ‘Where is my application in the process?’, we can tell them right away. Before Laserfiche, staff literally ran around looking through stacks of newly received documents.”

Members of the insurance industry are subject to rigorous audits from a variety of governing organizations, and ASI is no exception. That’s why Audit Trail plays such a big role in their compliance strategy. “We audit just about everything,” Perry says, “so that we can prove to auditors that we’re doing things right.” In addition to establishing granular security measures to prevent document deletion, ASI also meets recordkeeping requirements by publishing archived documents to read-only media using Laserfiche Plus.

Laserfiche administrative reporting tools also prove useful for tracking staff activity, through each stage of application processing. Moreover, ASI have started monitoring efficiency gains by tracking how many checks they process daily. While these metrics have only been in place for a short while, early returns indicate that Laserfiche has provided an excellent ROI. A part-time staff member now handles the scanning that formerly required two full-time employees. In labor costs alone, ASI have nearly recouped their Laserfiche investment, and Perry says they’ll do so completely within the year.

Perry projects further system expansion in the near future. The premiums accounting department is starting to process checks and payment stubs using Laserfiche, and Perry is interested in Checkmation, the electronic check processing add-on to Laserfiche that’s available from the Professional Developer Partnership program. Eventually, they’d like to submit checks to the bank electronically. And the policy issuing and fulfillment department is eager to automate the processes of creating and distributing those familiar policy information packets.

In the meantime, though, Perry and company are content with the new efficiency that Laserfiche has brought. “Laserfiche has given us everything we need,” he says. “It’s simple, it’s powerful and it’s secure.”

Tags: insurance

Posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 9:47 am under Customer Stories, Other Industries. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.