Insurance Case Studies

Conseco enjoys first year ROI of $410,000 utilizing docHarbor Online

The four billion dollar insurance provider cuts costs and streamlines business operations with docHarbor.

Conseco, Inc. is a Fortune 500 provider of supplemental health insurance, life insurance and annuities for almost five million customers. Conseco markets and sells its insurance products through multiple subsidiaries like Conseco Insurance Group (via independent insurance agents), Bankers Life and Casualty (through Bankers' career insurance agents) and Colonial Penn Life (in the form of television, Internet and direct mail promotion and sales channels).

The situation: The need to eliminate paper and microfiche-based processes

According to Kenneth Cygan, PMP, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Output Services, Conseco needed to save money by eliminating paper and microfiche-based capture, storage, distribution and retrieval of various types of mostly internal reports. Most of Conseco's operational processes for these businesses depended on data output from mainframes to high-speed printers. Payroll, marketing, commission and other paper reports were archived in file cabinets, or converted to CD-ROM or microfiche, then archived. However, these processes had evolved ad hoc over time and involved redundant activities and needless labor that drove up costs.

For instance, employees had to manually separate many paper reports after printing so they could be mailed to different home office locations and hundreds of Bankers Life and Casualty field offices. When reports were converted to microfilm, they were even harder to distribute - a department's film archivist had to make a paper copy of the film report and mail it out. It was difficult to centrally manage archives distributed throughout the enterprise on disparate media.

The solution: Anacomp's DocHarbor Online

Cygan's first priority was finding a solution to reduce print, mail, and distribution expenses. With docHarbor from Anacomp, he got that and much more.

To install a digital capture/storage/retrieval solution, he'd have to invest in infrastructure for capture (high-speed scanners and capture software), storage (microfilm, optical jukeboxes, tape arrays and storage area networks) and retrieval (wide area networks and storage and retrieval software). Of course, he'd incur additional personnel costs for the staff required to install and manage these systems. Also, because the legacy mainframe systems output print streams in over 50 data formats, he would have to hire a mainframe programmer to integrate those systems with a common digital archive and store and retrieve data in its native format or translate those formats into a common archive format.

By leasing docHarbor's hosted solution, he avoided all these complications and dramatically cut costs. docHarbor eliminated the scanning phase of the process altogether. It imports mainframe print streams in their native formats such as Metacode, Xerox Line Condition Data Streams and IBM AFP without any internal programming changes to the company's legacy systems and converts them into a common archive format. In Conseco's case, this was PDF. When users retrieve reports online, they view them in their original form just as they would paper reports, but they cannot change them.

Cygan says at regular "release meetings," staff from the department releasing a batch of data tells the Output Group and docHarbor its indexing, distribution and retention requirements. Cygan says "docHarbor can index off of any variable on a report - policy number, field office number, agent number. We just highlight what output on the report we would like to be able to access, and docHarbor takes it from there."

To distribute reports, docHarbor uses multiple variables to automatically separate reports into different runs. For instance, Cygan explains that docHarbor can index commission statements by agent number and sales region and distribute them electronically to both the agent and his regional headquarters or, alternatively, to all regional headquarters if a policy covered a family living in different states.

docHarbor uses indexing variables in a similar way to set retention schedules. By indexing a quarterly financial report by date, for instance, Cygan says "that date variable on the actual report can be used in retention management to make sure we don't keep anything longer than that legal retention date." Quarterly financial reports would accordingly be purged annually after they are consolidated into an annual report to save on storage, but those annual reports would be retained for seven years then purged to meet retention regulations governing the financial industry.

docHarbor can also perform custom searches and holds. For instance, commission statements are indexed by both agent number and date. So if, for example, for litigation over disparities in commission reports during a certain period, Cygan says he could prepare for court by searching all statements using those variables for dates occurring during that period for that agent and pull them into an untamperable PDF on-the-fly.

docHarbor also readily integrates with various enterprise portal environments to give users access to data from a customizable browser-based interface but allow administrators to establish access rights during the index phase. For Conseco, docHarbor programmers quickly integrated with the existing Bankers Life and Casualty web portal using docHarbor's Application Program Interface (API) Toolkit and used Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for security. "ccess to data was restricted by different index settings," explains Cygan.

Users can only view documents they are granted access to via the portal, so they can't access, modify and re-enter a document in the archive. "One of docHarbor's main selling features," says Cygan, "is that once you send it the data it will not only be secure but also not be altered in any way," which is another key requirement for financial records.

The results: ROI of $410,000 in year one

Cygan estimates Conseco netted an ROI of $410,000 in year one. Not only did it dramatically downsize its Chicago Print Center operation by printing 17 million fewer pages but it also radically cut mailing and distribution costs. Conseco's internal business operations are also more efficient. For instance, using the web portal to access data in the docHarbor archive, over 4,000 Conseco Bankers Life and Casualty salespeople retrieve commission statements online up to four days faster than in the past.

Life Insurance Company

"It's A Wonderful Life" Insurance Company

Agents, clients, staff and customer service representatives are often scattered around the country in headquarters and regional and field offices - that's life in the life insurance business. They all need immediate and universal access to policies, annuities, endorsements, renewals notices, riders, pricing, statements, claims reports and more, and some need access to authorized information only.

A specific life insurance company wanted to improve its document service by gaining an edge over the competition by enabling a high level of personalized customer self-service directly through the insurance company's website.

docHarbor Online delivered its response in making diverse and sometimes complex documents and other customer information (including account histories) available - all using the power of the web. It's done via a centralized repository which delivers a single, unified view or presentment of all documents for all authorized users, which also meets critical compliance requirements for electronic capture, management and delivery all documents.

Immediately, electronic access caused printing and mailing costs to nosedive.

The result not only improved customer service (either by continuous self-service or "live" customer service), it also provided for access to strategic and sales information in report format, which is needed to make management decisions.