Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Mobile Solutions: Helping Savvy Insurers Improve Profitability

// May 11th, 2012 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Insurance, IT, Mobile, Uncategorized // Troy Gross

Let’s face it. Insurance companies aren’t known for enthusiastically embracing new technologies. In the face of ever-changing regulatory requirements, an unstable economy and a more demanding consumer base, convincing an insurance CFO to invest in new technology solutions presents a formidable challenge for even a seasoned negotiator.

Savvy insurers will realize, however, that survival and success depends largely on their willingness to innovate. One such innovation whose time has come in insurance is mobile solutions; in fact, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the market for tablet PCs grew 207 percent in 2011 while smartphones grew by 63 percent. Mobile solutions are key components of any growth strategy…and we’re not talking about passing Blackberries out to employees and agents.

A Simple Equation
Insurance companies have to do a better job of managing risk, controlling expense, creating new products and attracting profitable customers. Mobile solutions are an integral part of achieving these initiatives. They help improve profitability through top-line enhancement and cost containment and help save money, mitigate risk, and increase productivity. Mobile solutions can also attract new customers, retain current policyholders and help insurers tap into new markets with new products.

Revenues
In addition to shedding risky customers, forward-thinking insurers proactively retain and attract the most profitable policyholders. In today’s competitive marketplace, this requires the insurer to empower its field force and agent producers with the tools to capture business at/or near the point of sale. By extending capabilities to mobile devices, insurers augment and support existing lifecycle processes, from new business/underwriting to claims. With anywhere, anytime access to visual representations (illustrations, loss control, damage estimation) or forms-based and repeatable applications (application submissions, loss reports), staff keep processes moving – whether online or offline.

Key revenue advantages gained from mobile solutions include:

• Shortens cycle times for new business capture
• Speeds information sharing and better visibility into processes
• Improves attraction and retention of next-generation agent producers
• Reduces costs and time associated with completing and signing paper-based documents
• Minimizes the risk of information being lost or improperly entered into other systems
• Strengthens brand value

Costs
Cost containment is a key driver for an insurer’s business strategy regardless of the unknown long-term effects today’s downturned economic conditions and increased government regulations may have. But, a sustained, sluggish economy creates apprehensive consumers. And, while softening prices – either directly or through discounted bundling – have been somewhat successful in minimizing policyholder fears they’ve resulted in declining revenues and are unsustainable in the long run.  Unprecedented levels of government-imposed legislation and regulations impact profitability as well, with insurers continually facing an evolving host of legal requirements from state insurance boards as well as federal oversight. Given this reality, in order to maintain profitability, insurers must focus on increasing operational efficiencies and decreasing expenses.

Mobile technologies provide real opportunities for cost containment, including:

• Improved response rates achieved though instant access to forms, loss notices or documents
• Increased effectiveness by eliminating redundant tasks, as evidence such as photos, videos, voice recordings, diagrams or signed documents are captured onsite and uploaded to the system
• Decreased time and risks around transferring information from the field to the underwriter or the home office
• Reduced dependence on expensive air/wireless cards due to the ability to work offline

While the insurance sector has historically been conservative in adopting new technology, mobile technology seems ideally positioned to help today’s insurers establish a competitive advantage. By implementing mobile technologies to address two major challenges – controlling costs and attracting profitable customers to increase revenues – will position insurers to succeed in a highly-demanding, evolving industry.

Paperless Process to Improve Productivity and Profit: A Bold Move for P&C New Business/Underwriting

// May 1st, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Insurance, IT, Mobile, Uncategorized // Troy Gross

What drives insurers to invest in information technology? If you’d asked that question five years ago – before Mayhem, Flo and that little green lizard – the answer would have been simple: to improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs.

Today, according to Strategy Meets Action (SMA), the top three business drivers for information technology are all about enabling growth. Sure, improving operational efficiencies and cost reductions are still important, but the focus has shifted to improving customer experience, for both policyholders and agents, and growing the business. As a result, many Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers turn their attention to the areas where the premium dollars start and are streamlining their new business/underwriting process by making the leap from paper to digital.

And times are changing fast. Agents and brokers are now demanding enhanced approaches to submissions, more collaboration with underwriters, and faster responses to prospects and customers. Underwriters are seeking more capabilities to liberate them from low-value tasks in an effort to optimize their unique expertise. Insurers with modern new business/underwriting processes do more than attract more business from the distribution channel. They improve profitability by supporting straight-through processing for simple decisions and providing underwriters with the information required for complex decision more quickly.

The leading insurance companies have shifted their automation objectives from pure productivity improvements to a healthy blend of productivity and profit. To stay competitive, insurers can no longer sit on their hands. It’s time to start making bold moves to realize improved productivity and profits.

Industry analysts Deb Smallwood and Mark Breading will discuss how to make those bold moves on May 2 at 1 p.m. ET.

The Race to Improve Claims Response

// April 16th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Insurance // Troy Gross

The level of care that claims organizations provide is an integral part of an insurer’s overall product delivery. Today, customers choose insurers for more than just complete coverage and good rates. They also demand great service, particularly at the time of a claim when the customer is hoping for a quick, painless resolution to a stressful situation. Therefore, it is critical to customer satisfaction and, ultimately, to the insurer’s ongoing success, to deliver exceptional service. 

Getting out of the gate
The key to delivering exemplary customer care is quickly responding to claims inquiries. In order to do so, claims representatives must get their hands on the information they need to answer questions and resolve issues fast and accurately. And, with statistics showing that the majority of all customer interactions are accomplished via documents, it is clear that representatives need real-time access to all claim-related documents wherever the information resides.

Reaching the finish line
The challenge for most claims organizations lies in implementing technology solutions to simplify the complexities of harnessing documents. While it sounds easy enough, many insurers are still struggling for ways to manage information produced by a host of systems and spread across underwriting, policy administration, and claims management systems, so that it may be accessed by non-technical, claims representatives when they  need it.

Simplifying this level of complexity requires comprehensive document and process management technologies designed for insurer’s claims organizations. These are the exact technologies that have been helping Universal Insurance Group, Puerto Rico’s largest writer of personal lines, “reach the finish line” in improving claims response – achieving a 95% customer satisfaction rate while processing over 77,000 claims each year. (Learn more about Universal Group’s use of ECM!)

Becoming a pace-setter
By leveraging its enterprise content management (ECM) system, Universal increased the efficiency of its claims management process and empowered employees to deliver better claims experiences to customers. With a 60% improvement in vehicle inspection and appraisal time, Universal extends even more value to its customers as 45% of partial loss claims are processed and paid within one day, setting the pace in this race to improve claims response.

Let’s Talk About the ‘Enterprise’ in ECM

// April 9th, 2012 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Thomas Jenkins

We say it every day: “Enterprise Content Management” or “ECM.” We hear folks throw out words like “enterprise” records management strategy, “enterprise” document management, and “enterprise” capture or delivery models.

But despite all the “enterprise” jargon out there, organizations often find themselves taking a less than enterprise approach. That is, they immediately start off on an initiative of strategy limited to one office, department or division. They make the argument, “We need to increase productivity and see these efficiencies yesterday.”

So we put a solution in place and let it be. But in the long run, the organization or a project management office fails to convey the results to the larger enterprise because they’ve got little invested interest from others outside of their office, department or division – or at the enterprise level.

What happens next? Someone in another office, department or division fails to get their face-time with the project, results aren’t communicated, value isn’t seen, and then they go out and seek an alternative solution or strategy to hopefully realize the same enhancements and see such efficiencies. IT is left supporting multiple applications and different platforms. We hire people to manage individual solutions. We custom code. We pay for maintenance, upgrades and support on several systems. We bring on a business analyst to find out why we’re doing all this. Systems fail, products are sunset. And we’ve now got complex and over-engineered processes and tools cluttering up our day-to-day transactions.       

Whoa!? What happened to our enterprise approach?

And in terms of ECM deployments, now you’ve got multiple ECM systems. And if you haven’t seen it before, now you’ve got multiple lines of business processing and capturing similar documentation in totally different methods. Some users are capturing and classifying directly via Microsoft Outlook. Others are dragging and dropping all over the place. Some are using SharePoint. Remote users still prefer to save documents to their local or shared network drives. And some users are even printing and scanning images back into the ECM system.

If we’re going to talk about streamlining operations and improving efficiencies; tying business and technology together end-to-end; and improving an organization’s ability to collaborate more effectively – those are bigger concepts than just one or two office, departments or divisions can solve. They require participation and a vested interest by all parties. You need to understand the overarching and individual goals across the “enterprise.” Not just wherever the hot button is right now, because with as quickly as markets and strategies can shift, so can enterprise priorities.

So start by taking a more pragmatic, “yes,” “enterprise” approach. Believe it or not, you can always make a new investment in the latest and greatest product or service. However, if you buy into a system or strategy without taking a comprehensive 360 view of how (or if) your users will adopt it, use it, and/or react to it – the benefits and your hard or soft investment in terms of cost and time – may never be realized.

Follow an approach that engages either the entire organization or a select population. Engage more than just local technical experts. Bring in business and subject matter experts, executive or senior leadership, and the frontline employees. Understand what each office, department or division is working on today and what they need to deliver tomorrow. What’s prohibiting them from doing so? What are their challenges? Their goals? And what does long-term program success look like?

So the next time you say “Enterprise Content Management,” or “ECM,” think to yourself are you really talking about Enterprise Content Management? And what can you do to ensure you and your organization are getting the most out of your investment? My answer: think about your approach. Define a strategy and a path for who, what and where to engage. And then you’ll realize the real benefits of what Enterprise Content Management and OnBase can be.

Manual Labor and Capture: The Thorn in the Side of ECM

// March 12th, 2012 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Admissions, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Human Resources, Insurance, IT, Lending // Glenn Gibson

“Every rose has its thorn.” So croons Bret Michaels in the famous Poison song of the same name.

When it comes to relationships, he has a point. But is it also true of your enterprise content management (ECM) solution? If ECM is the beautiful rose, what is its thorn? 

Two simple – and expensive – words: manual labor.

Yes, after we settle in to enjoy the beautiful return on investment (ROI) of our ECM solution, we soon realize that the labor involved with manually typing document index values (names, addresses, account numbers and so forth) into our ECM system takes a lot of time and effort. It begins to feel, well, thorny. 

Even the study materials for the industry-recognized ECM certification CDIA+ tell us that manual labor associated with scanning and indexing can be the most expensive part of an ECM project.

Why?  Because manual data entry is slow, tedious and error-prone.

And those keyed-in errors can be very costly.

Costly errors in many locations

Much akin to someone misfiling a paper document, badly indexed electronic documents make your information difficult to find later on. This dramatically increases business process costs and can even lead to wrong decisions made due to incomplete information.

Now consider that your ECM system is only one of the places that this information is manually entered.  Duplicate data is often typed into several business systems, often by a variety of people across your organization.  Every time the same information is manually inputted, your risk of error increases.

And that just leads to added costs. Many organizations spend a ton of money on manual labor associated with indexing, but then turn around and spend more money on QA processes to make sure that the information is entered accurately.

So is there any way to extract this thorn from the side of ECM?  Yes, and it’s easy – stop doing manual data entry. It’s just painful.

Option 1:  Add ‘Advanced Capture’ technology to your ECM solution

People are not the only ones who can read and write, you know. Technological advancements allow computers to recognize relevant characters from a page, either typed or hand written, translate these into words, verify that they are correct, and fill in data fields for you.  What’s amazing is that this information can then be used to update ALL your other systems, simultaneously. 

Option 2: Outsource your scanning and indexing.

This option takes the manual labor associated with scanning and indexing off your hands altogether!  Instead of buying and maintaining scanners, and employing people to load them with paper and manually type in the index values, you can simply pay a fee for an organization with a Imaging Services department to do this for you.

Through this process, you send your documents to a central location where the scanning and indexing can be done for you, allowing you to instantly upload the documents and relevant data into your ECM and other relevant systems. 

This option can be a very cost effective approach for converting all those dusty boxes of documents into clean, easily accessible digital images.

So there you have it, there really is no reason to feel the pain of manual labor with your ECM system.  Depending on your business needs, you have two very good options to choose from.

In the end, it seems that Bret Michaels was actually wrong.  When penning those famous words in 1988, he had obviously never heard of the quite beautiful and thorn-less Lady Banks Rose. 

It’s likely that he hadn’t heard of Advanced Capture technologies out-sourced scanning providers either.

Mobile ECM: Well Within Your Grasp

// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT, Mobile // Lindsay McCune

Put mobile ECM into your employees' pockets

The concerns people have about ‘The Future of Work,’ with regard to mobile technologies, was top of mind for Vice President and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler. Schadler was speaking to Fortune 2000 organizations at Forrester’s Content and Collaboration Forum. Questions came pouring in:

• How are professionals using mobile devices?
• What about bring your own (BYO) versus corporate provisioning?
• What kinds of applications are available? Are they task-specific? Role-specific?
• How do I know which vendors are spending time on security and efficiency around development?
• How do I manage licensing?
• What about security?

To my surprise, some organizations anticipate it will take five years to get comfortable with mobile devices and all that goes into managing them. And while mobile will mature over the next few years, you shouldn’t stand still and try to catch up later.

It’s time for organizations to take small steps, and move out from under the blanket of consumer mobile enablement. It’s time to empower the worker. They have valuable needs that can be addressed today.

Enable your workforce

It is all about enablement – not just about devices or applications, but rather overall empowerment. Sure there are lots to things to consider – security and licensing, for example – but you don’t have to eat the whole apple. Just bite off what you can chew.

Start with roles or departments, like human resources or managers, rather than the diverse enterprise. Baby steps! Consider your goals and which employees would benefit most.

Maybe you are thinking you have much bigger fish to fry and that mobile business solutions are low on your priority list. I would argue that bringing your mobile devices into play with even your most basic business processes will reap immediate rewards and have a dramatic impact on your business.

How about an example

So, let’s imagine you are a human resources manager hiring new employees. Let’s also imagine you are on vacation in Hawaii. Your company is competitive and needs to act quickly to get offer letters and other documentation to your soon-to-be colleagues. But you are hanging out by the ocean and won’t be back for a week. Those irreplaceable new hires now take the offer of your competitor. Think of the now wasted time spent interviewing, completing reference checks and all.

Now, imagine you are in Hawaii and getting ready for the day, checking the weather on your smartphone and you notice that you also have notifications from your mobile enterprise content management (ECM) application to approve. Through your mobile device, you can push these offer letters through workflow. With a few taps, you’re done.

It’s time to look beyond mobile’s soft consumer side and empower the devices to make your organization more efficient and more competitive. Are you ready?

The Evolution of ECM and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011

// October 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // AJ Hyland

While the stand-out fact in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011, was the 7.6 percent growth in the ECM industry, even in a down economy and as organizations tighten their tech investment belts, what’s more remarkable is the rapid evolution of enterprise content management as a strategic business solution. 

Gone are the days when ECM was little more than a means by which companies transformed paper documentation into electronic information and then organized and disseminated that information to employees and staff. That still occurs, but it is really now only a foundational piece to a much larger solution.

Or, truly, solutions, because every organization is as different as the business content and process challenges they face. You see, it’s about more than knowing where your information is and how to quickly access it. It’s about leveraging that information in a meaningful way so that you can achieve your specific organizational goals, all the while taking care to achieve just the right balance of focus and flexibility in that endeavor.

What do I mean by this?

I’m saying think of your ECM solution holistically – beyond what you want to capture and how you want to capture it. Consider who will access this information. When will they do it and why? Is your audience an admissions staff? Or a business decision maker whose office is in the air or on the road? Is that information critical to keeping your business moving forward, to beating the competition or better serve a constituent?

In other words, are you leveraging your information in a meaningful way? Do you have a protocol in place should your admissions staff get snowed in during the busiest time of year? Can your managers and executives make decisions via their mobile phones whether they’re in Boston or Bermuda?

A strategic ECM solution must have the flexibility to help answer those questions. It must work in concert with other software solutions, to accurately capture, process and quickly distribute information to staff when and where they need it, and connect the content dots that allow organizations to gain the competitive advantage, better serve their constituents – or both.

Strategic ECM vendors will help organizations elevate their game by focusing on speed of deployment, getting organizations up and running faster, putting them ahead of the competition sooner or offering improved services to constituents faster.

After all, the strategic use of ECM is a differentiator for today’s organizations. And there is ample opportunity to become even more competitive using ECM technology.

Mobile ECM: Your Content In Your Pocket

// October 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Glenn Gibson

Put mobile ECM into the pocket of your employees

The world of computing has changed. Forever.

These days it seems archaic to have to wait until you get home or to the office just to check your email, because now your email is in your pocket. The idea of printing off maps before heading out on a journey seems crazy because GPS on our phone gives us turn-by-turn directions. Lively pop-culture debates over a pint are now a thing of the past, because we can look up the answers on the internet immediately.

Yes, mobile computing devices have changed the world and changed us.  We expect instant access to information from wherever we are. The iPhone and the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Blackberry give us this access like never before.

So what does the explosion in mobile computing have to do with ECM?  Everything. 

Think about it. What is one of the primary driving factors behind an organization developing an ECM strategy? The need to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time. That’s what ECM is all about. 

But what if the right people are in the wrong place at the wrong time? What I mean is, what if the people who are responsible for making important decisions, from approving a critical business expense to agreeing to hire the perfect candidate, can’t physically get access to the information and systems they need in order to execute business decisions, simply because they are travelling or not in the office?   

The reality is that these individuals spend a lot of time on the road and out of the office. This lack of real-time access causes bottlenecks in your processes as the decisions have to wait until they get back online. This causes on-the-fly workarounds with emails and phone calls to get someone, anyone, with authority to make the decision. And once that decision has finally been made, it is very difficult to track all the activity that supports it. 

Yup, bottlenecks and workarounds caused when people who play a critical role in business decisions are out of the office have come to be expected as a normal part of business because, until recently, that’s just how it was. There was no other choice.

But, the world of computing has changed. If the ability to access email from anywhere in the world is not only a reality, but expected in today’s world, why is it any different when thinking about your other important business content and processes?

It shouldn’t be. And when you partner with an ECM vendor who understands this, it is not.

Today you can put your ECM content in your pocket. With mobile ECM applications you are able to not only able access your important content, but also participate in business processes, reviewing, approving and denying requests from wherever you are, directly from your mobile device. 

Now it is likely, for many good reasons that you may not want to make ALL your business information available via mobile devices. If mobile access to your information is part of your requirements when you are choosing an ECM vendor, you should look for a vendor which allows you to control what type of content and processes to make available via these mobile devices. You should choose an ECM system that can truly deliver on the promise to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time, wherever they happen to be.

For your business this is both simple and profound. No more waiting to get back to the office. No more driving to coffee shops just to get access to your system to approve a request. No more bottlenecks caused by business travel. No more un-documented workarounds.  

It is that simple. It is that revolutionary. Because now your content is right there in your pocket.