Suburban General Insurance (SGI) is a mid-sized, family-owned commercial and personal insurance agency in New Jersey established in 1973 by John W. Arbucho & James F. Rosen. It represents the country’s leading insurance carriers. But until May 2003 when it implemented a DocuWare electronic imaging system in its claims and sales departments, it was spending more time processing claims than generating new business.

Because it was manually managing claims, staff had to store documents both on and off-site and often mis-filed and lost documents. Simply retrieving documents took a long time.

While these problems usually plague manual operations, they were especially troublesome to SGI. Insurance companies must store many different types of documents like applications, forms, affidavit certificates of insurance, no loss letters, binders, documents, claim letters, and contracts. Customer files could also be sizable documents. For instance, a simple personal policy could reach 100 pages, while a complex commercial policy could run into the hundreds.

What’s more, staff used inconsistent filing procedures so customer files were never in the same order, which made finding a document within the file especially time-consuming. Processing a claim, or changing policies for existing clients, was also an onerous process. To change a policy agents had to retrieve three to four different files, locate the document to be changed, make the change, fax a copy of the change to the insurance carrier, place a copy of the fax in the file, and enter the change in the policy management system.

Knowing a change was needed; SGI spent much of 2002 learning about electronic document management. According to Fred DeBonis, vice president of Operations, “Other agencies in our industry were moving to transactional filing systems, but we were more comfortable with imaging and felt we could implement an imaging system for a good price.” A DocuWare reseller, Futuretech, showed SGI a demo of DocuWare and after reviewing testimonials from other users the company decided to implement the product.

Fast To Implement, Easy to Operate
Implementation of the system took only three weeks during which Futuretech worked closely with SGI to plan and test the system and train personnel on the DocuWare solution. They evaluated document storage and retrieval methods, indexing criteria, hardware sizing, scanning methodology, and user training needs. The solution is comprised of five Canon DR- 2080C scanners—one on almost every desk—and the DocuWare software.

Now, when mail, i.e., a policy cancellation, comes in, a customer service representative (CSR) first makes a notation in the company’s Applied Systems insurance application to indicate, say, changes to a policy. Then, using DocuWare’s capture module, Isys Pro, the changes are scanned and filed in the DocuWare system.

Basic indexing is easy—CSRs simply key in the policy number and automatically pull index information like client name, client number, policy type, document type, and effective date from the insurance application’s database. The DocuWare system automatically runs optical character recognition on the new scanned data at night to then yield a full-text index so users can also search using those extracted key words. This way they have multiple efficient methods for quick and easy access to customer, policy, and claim information. Although all scanning is done onsite, CSRs can also access all DocuWare information over the Web—so CSRs often work on documents from home. All data is stored on a Dell RAID storage configuration.

With the DocuWare solution, SGI staff can answer questions, update insurance information, and fulfill customer inquiries with the click of a button.

Big Benefits Come in Affordable Packages
SGI pursued this kind of solution with specific goals in mind. It wanted to improve document retrieval time and customer service, improve the way files were filed and refiled, reallocate or redirect more personnel toward revenue-generating activities instead of claims processing, meet record retention regulations, find a system that was cost-effective to maintain, and easy for employees to learn and use.

SGI immediately and dramatically improved employee productivity and customer service because document retrieval is automated—files are available at the click of a button and the drudgery of hunting for information then re-filing it is no longer necessary. Staff promptly handle requests even for a copy of an entire customer file. The agent just performs a search by client number, places the results list in date order, and prints a complete chronological copy of the customer file.

Employees now spend much more time generating new business instead of performing manual retrieval and other manual tasks. In the past, seventy-five percent of the company’s efforts were devoted to servicing customer’s accounts—now with DocuWare the sales side of the business is the main focus and revenue is increasing. Debonis explains, “We have increased our billable premiums by $3 to 4 million with only two years of effort—DocuWare is a big factor in this success.”

SGI also is no longer challenged to meet record retention regulations because digital documents are now securely and accurately filed and unable to be misplaced. The DocuWare solution helped SGI meet state and federal records retention regulations and ensures crucial documents are available if ever needed for a court case, thus reducing SGI’s legal liability. The fact that the system has automated claims service has reduced errors and omissions and has allowed SGI to cut the cost of its own omissions insurance policy.

Debonis says the system’s ease of use and efficiency has cut employee stress levels. Information is available at staff’s fingertips, staff isn’t running around in exasperation to try to fulfill customer requests, and the office is much more orderly without half-researched files scattered about.

Furthermore, while processing day forward claims SGI was soon simultaneously able to process all of its backfile claims in one and the same digital repository. This, of course, meant it requires less office and storage space, so the the company was able to eliminate off-site storage and the fees for it and also move to a smaller office. The savings in storage and office rental alone totaled $30,000 annually.

Inasmuch as the DocuWare system costs only $35,000, the savings on rental alone just about paid off the system. With other benefits—better productivity and customer service as well as more aggressive revenue generation—the company achieved payback in less than a year.

Overall, Debonis is convinced that SGI’s adoption of electronic imaging with DocuWare has made the company more competitive in the New Jersey insurance market by better controlling costs and keeping the company on the leading edge of technology. Other insurance agencies not willing to update their business practices with imaging have seen business taper off or have actually gone out of business. With DocuWare as the key enabling technology for claims processing and customer service, Debonis is confident of SGI’s ability to maintain its commitment to providing customers with quality insurance products, prompt claim payments and sound business practices for decades to come.

At the moment, Debonis is evaluating ways DocuWare can help SGI capture and manage emails coming into the company so CSRs can act as quickly in response to their requests as they do with requests arriving through regular mail.

--John Harney (johnharney2@netzero.com ) is president of ASPWatch, a consultancy for application service providers and software-as-aservice vendors.