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.”

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.”