#Scanning as part of the overall #lifeinsurance policy #workflow and process. Pre-issue #process visioning, both strategic and tactical, is critical to the #policylifecycle. The decision to invest in systems or #offshore resources ultimately should get evaluated within the context of current #businessprocesses.

1. BEST’S REVIEW
Technology Insight
Technology December 2008
M aximizing document cap- group customers, have enough “soft-
By ture, indexing and catego- dollar return on investment” to warrant
Gates Ouimette rization efficiencies during the investment. Hard-dollar cost savings
the pre-issue stage of an insurance often won’t amount to enough for insur-
policy lifecycle is something insur- ers already heavily invested in pre-issue
ers have been striving toward for document capture and imaging systems.
years. Insurers have long been heavy The decision to invest in systems or
imaging systems users, with signifi- offshore resources ultimately should get
cant cost savings achieved through evaluated within the context of current
implementations of these systems. business processes which lend them-
With advances in scanning soft- selves to a potential document process-
ware and hardware, optical character ing systems refresh. Can a more straight-
recognition/intelligent character rec- through process cut down on the
ognition, content management and number of manual processing errors?
Will customer satisfaction
A Refreshing Start
benefit from improved sys-
tem-related document trans-
parency resulting in having
a view of the most current
status of a new, in-process
Pre-issue process work flow/business rules engines, are policy application?
there additional benefits available to When evaluating investments in
visioning, both strategic insurers by a refresh in their current policy-related document capture and
and tactical, is critical to in-house new business systems? processing, a strategic perspective at the
the policy lifecycle. For example, lower error rates in overall process level is required—from
newer scanning software can theoreti- receipt of new business documents to
cally allow for more automated process- printing/mailing the final contract.This
ing and less manual intervention of would include:
incoming documents within the new • Understanding the initial “input”
business process. If the software also business architecture at a macro level
proves consistent enough to be used as and reviewing the pros and cons of
part of the categorization of these docu- how to incent the gradual use of more
ments, there’s potentially larger value standard methods such as online sub-
in a system refresh, based upon more mission and supplying downloadable
timely collecting/sorting/grouping of all forms to insert in fax streams.
requisite new policy paperwork. • Reviewing the overall process
However, since the consistency of flow and identifying potential quick-
The decision to invest in scanning solutions across multiple docu- win projects using the latest in work
systems or offshore ment types is still not 100%, for compa- flow/rules engines, content aggregation,
nies having large document input streams, metadata extraction/mapping, search
resources ultimately adding inexpensive offshore resources to technologies etc.
should get evaluated do the scanning, indexing and categoriza- • Always mapping the overall
within the context of cur- tion functions can sometimes still provide systems architecture at a strategic,
a less expensive alternative. best possible solution level such as
rent business processes. Despite this possibly less-tangible service-oriented architecture, and
business benefit resulting from upgrad- then striving to implement technolo-
ing current document processing gies and solutions that, at a minimum,
systems, the business decision to do so allow more simple future integration
could come down to whether increases of newer, better solutions.
in process efficiencies, accuracy, trans- Using this more strategic
parency and scalability, and their impact approach against a well-defined,
on distribution channels, retail and understood and documented vision
in the pre-issue stage will result in
Gates Ouimette is a Best’s Review insurers being able to make tactical
decisions and investments without
columnist from Massachusetts. He
can be reached at gateso@yahoo.com. sacrificing long-term benefits. BR
60 BEST’S REVIEW • DECEMBER 2008 • RepRint
Copyright © 2008 by A.M. Best Company, inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.