Technology

Happy campers

ImageRight customers find the product delivers on its promise to improve operations, increase productivity, reduce expenses & eliminate paper

By Nancy Doucette

When you think about raving fans, your first thought might not be the customers of a data imaging, content management and workflow product. But when you see comments like the following, you start to sense that these raving fans aren’t too different from the cheering throngs at sporting events.

“We couldn’t have grown at the pace that we have, given our building constraints and how long it used to take to process paper, without ImageRight.” —Ed Sitz, IT Manager, Med James, Inc., Overland Park, Kansas

“I compared the contracts of several other document management vendors with ImageRight’s contract. Only ImageRight offers a money-back guarantee. They stand behind their work.”—Oscar Miniet, Senior Vice President/CIO, HBA Insurance Group, Miami, Florida

“With our increased efficiency and improved productivity, ImageRight has paid for itself.”—Susan Treen, Vice President, MIS, Yates & Associates Insurance Services, Inc., Tustin, California

Isolated cases? A survey conducted by NAPSLO (National Association of Professional Surplus Lines Offices, Ltd.) that was released earlier in 2007 indicated that over half of the respondents (brokers, MGAs and carriers) using a document manage-ment system use ImageRight.

Vertafore, Inc., the parent company of AMS Services, acquired ImageRight in April 2007. According to Vertafore Senior Vice President Bill Bunker, “Vertafore acquired ImageRight because we think document management and workflow are critical capabilities for organizations in the insurance distribution system, and ImageRight is the clear leader in that business. They have a very strong customer base across the industry.”

“ImageRight provides services to the entire insurance vertical,” notes Mike Fess, product visionary for ImageRight. “That includes retail agents, MGAs, GAs, carriers, reinsurers, TPAs, stamping offices, and guaranty funds.”

“Insurance is all we do,” states Phil Iaccarino, director of marketing for ImageRight. “Some other solution providers have an insurance division. Our entire focus is the insurance vertical.”

If at first you don’t succeed

Ed Sitz, IT manager for Med James, Inc., an MGA, wholesaler and carrier, recalls that the organization already had another imaging system when he came onboard nearly six years ago. “Our old system had great ‘curb appeal,’” he remembers. “But its workflow capabilities were nonexistent. We needed a document management system.”

One of Sitz’s first duties was to replace the old imaging system, which was basically collecting dust. The four file rooms in Med James’s building were filled to capacity. In the four years since moving to ImageRight, Med James has been able to remodel those file rooms into usable office space. Sitz’s six-person staff, which used to be scattered throughout the building, now occupies one of those offices. Med James has added two new divisions. And the policy count has grown.

“We couldn’t have grown at the pace that we have, given our building constraints and how long it used to take to process paper, without ImageRight,” says Sitz. “Our biggest area of gain was the space. We also gained huge efficiencies. We didn’t have to reduce staff when we switched to ImageRight. We reallocated people to new tasks that didn’t exist before ImageRight—scanning and indexing.”

Sitz says those huge efficiency gains can be traced to the workflows that ImageRight helped Med James implement. “We didn’t realize how convoluted and out of synch our workflows were,” he confides. One of the first steps in the implementation timeline was for the ImageRight project manager to visit Med James to analyze its workflows and observe its processes. One area that really caught the project manager’s attention was the processing unit for the commercial lines division, which handled transportation, garage and P&C. “Even though they’re writing different lines, they should have the same internal processes, and they didn’t,” Sitz recalls. He says that because ImageRight focuses exclusively on the insurance vertical, they understand processes and workflows and can pass that knowledge along to customers.

Getting the staff used to the new approach slowed down business for a couple of weeks, he says. But since then, “I can’t count the number of man-hours that we save anymore.”

On the carrier side of the Med James operation, Sitz estimates that they order about 30,000 MVRs a month. Before ImageRight, underwriters would order the MVRs and wait for them to come back. Once they did, someone would print out all the MVRs and then manually match them up with each application. “We used to spend hours every day printing MVRs and matching them with apps,” he comments. Once matched, the MVR and app would be returned to the underwriter, who would process it and then hand it off to policy issuance.

Now, Sitz says, every application is scanned into ImageRight when it arrives. The MVRs are handled via a Web service and XML. The MVR is matched up with the app electronically and a task is sent to the underwriter, indicating that it’s in the workflow. They’re directed automatically into ImageRight and into the auto department’s workflow—critical steps created during that early visit by the project manager. “Everything is done without handling paper anymore,” Sitz notes. That also means less money needs to be budgeted for printing supplies and less space needs to be allocated for warehousing paper and toner.

A bit of nitty-gritty

ImageRight recommends front-end scanning so that all the functionality within its system can be utilized. “We make sure that the front-end scanning process is smooth, efficient and fast so that documents get into an electronic format as quickly as possible,” says Mike Fess. He points out that back-end scanning carries with it all the overhead and limitations of dealing with paper. Front-end scanning also increases the number of touch points—scanner, indexer, underwriter or CSR. A good thing is that all those touch points ensure that documents are in the correct file.

“Once something is scanned up front,” adds Phil Iaccarino, “it’s in an electronic file, so if somebody calls to confirm that you’ve received something they sent, you can quickly look that up. It may not be processed, but you know you have it. So your customer service improves.” Compare that to hunting through stacks of paper on people’s desks.

Another feature of the ImageRight system that reduces the possibility of misfiles is that it’s a file centric system. Fess explains that in ImageRight, documents are associated to a specific file. Images are stored as a separate file for each page. “If you looked at our system, you would see the entire file in a tree view. All the documents related to this file are logically associated. You just arrow up and down through the tree to see those different documents.”

ImageRight also provides page level control, he adds, which enhances the speed with which the images open. What’s more, it lets users select random pages of a document. For example, “suppose you needed to e-mail pages 4, 7 and 9 to a producer. Without page level control you’d have to open up the entire document and then split it out to get those pages,” Fess explains.

ImageRight has integration at the file level with many agency and policy management systems. So if an organization has all its policies in its management system, those policy numbers, insured names and other indexing information can be pulled into ImageRight without someone having to manually enter that data. That makes the indexing process pretty straightforward, according to Iaccarino. “It doesn’t require in-depth insurance knowledge,” he says. “So the mailroom people or the person at the front desk are now taking on the role of indexer.” He adds that organizations can custom code different applications to integrate with ImageRight as well.

Big picture perspective

“Something that retail agents may not see as important initially is that there are a lot of carriers and MGAs that use ImageRight also,” observes Oscar Miniet, senior vice president and CIO of HBA Insurance Group. “With those integrations in place, our files synch easily. We can trade documents with our ImageRight carriers and MGAs, and use ‘smart’ ImageRight workflow technology to get those documents to the correct destination without human intervention. This ImageRight function works really well with submission and endorsement requests to the carrier or MGA on our end, and policy or endorsement delivery from the carrier or MGA to us. So with those integrations, the technology gets even smarter and more efficient. It streamlines the delivery process.”

HBA has been using ImageRight for about three years. It was the unanimous choice of the selection committee that the agency had assembled to evaluate the three final different document management products. Miniet explains that the committee included individuals with a cross-section of skill sets— “some real techies, some mid-range people and some not-so-techie people,” he recalls.

The ImageRight solution provided a file structure that was identical to the paper-based model that the staff was used to. That was preferable to what the other two “finalists” offered. “We would have had to attach the documents to activities on the ‘back end’ of the workflow process,” Miniet notes. “To find a document, you’d have to scroll down through the activity to look for the particular document you wanted, then open it. It was too cumbersome.”

From a management perspective, Miniet says the money-back guarantee that ImageRight offers indicated to him that the company stands behind its product. “I compared the contracts of several other document management vendors with ImageRight’s contract. Only ImageRight offers a money-back guarantee.”

Early on he gained another important insight into the “heart” of the ImageRight organization. “One of the first things you do, once you decide to go with ImageRight, is to sign a letter of intent and give them $1,000 as ‘earnest money,’” he explains. “But here’s what’s interesting about that. They donate that earnest money to the Pulmonary Hypertension Association in honor of a former employee who passed away from pulmonary hypertension.”

Once all the steps of the implementation timeline had been completed, HBA was ready to go live. “ImageRight recommended that we do a phased implementation,” Miniet continues. “Our agency was already divided into teams, so we started with the 20-person team that reports to me. About two weeks later, we did another team. We did the entire agency in four phases. With each phase we learned some things that made the subsequent phases easier.”

As part of its service agreement, ImageRight has people on site during the “go-live” process. “ImageRight has even researched the psychology of going paperless,” Miniet notes. “They know that about three weeks after going live, everybody will be fine with the processes and procedures. ‘Go-live’ week is stressful, and ImageRight knows that. So they have their people in your office to make the process go as smoothly as possible.”

After about 30 days on the ImageRight system, Miniet says the staff really began to appreciate the product’s workflow capabilities. “With front-end scanning, you know where everything is and what everything is,” he says. “You know how many policies a CSR has to check, how many premium-bearing endorsements a CSR has to process, and how many cancellations came in on any given day. So if you find one of the CSRs has a backlog, you can redistribute the work among the other CSRs. Our team coordinators can do that in about 30 seconds with three clicks of the mouse and never leave their desk.”

With increasing numbers of carriers sending policies electronically to agencies, HBA set up a specific e-mail address for its carriers to use when sending policies via e-mail. “We prefer that the carriers send the policies electronically,” Miniet says. “ImageRight picks them up from that address, the indexing process occurs and it’s put into the customer’s file with a task created for the CSR assigned to the customer.

“Insurance companies are pushing more and more work down to the agent level, and they’re paying us less commission,” he observes. “We must find ways to make ourselves more efficient and to stay profitable. We want to automate that work and have fewer people touch it.”

“Once an organization goes paperless,” ImageRight’s Mike Fess says, “the document management system becomes more critical than the lights in the building.”

Tailoring a solution

Ask Susan Treen, vice president of MIS for Yates & Associates Insurance Services, Inc., why she encouraged her organization to choose ImageRight, and she admits she has to stop and think about it. “I need to think back to 1999, and that’s a long time,” she says with a laugh. She recalls there were three reasons, actually. She preferred ImageRight because it is an industry-specific solution. She also was impressed by the speed of the product’s page changes. And finally, the images aren’t in a proprietary format. In other words, the images are in a standard TIF format.

“In the beginning we used the system mostly for file retrieval,” she says. But like other organizations, as staff began to use the system more, everyone began to appreciate the product’s workflow capabilities and the intelligence that was built into the system. However, a workflow needs to be dynamic so that it can be adapted to the changing needs of the organization. Treen says ImageRight makes those workflow adjustments simple.

“Our workflows are updated by our EVP of operations. To create or enhance a workflow, you need to understand the entire process for a particular document that comes from the outside—where does it go, who touches it, how long are they supposed to have it, what happens if they don’t do something to it, all the way to the end where the task is completed.” At Yates & Associates, it’s the EVP of operations, not someone in IT, who is best qualified to do that, Treen says. Using the workflow definer module, Treen’s colleague can take the workflow offline, edit it and get it back online. For organizations that prefer not to do this themselves, ImageRight is available to assist.

Treen notes that Yates & Associates uses a number of the modules that ImageRight offers, which has enabled them to tailor the product to fit their unique needs. Like HBA, Yates & Associates uses the e-mail module and has set up special e-mail addresses to receive quotes, inspections, binders and policies.

Additionally, they use the briefcase module for outsourced clerical work. “We can task things to these remote workers, they process them and then they task them back to us,” Treen explains. “They ‘see’ only the documents I permit them to see—the app, the quote, the rate sheet—whatever is necessary for them to issue a policy.”

She also uses the advanced reporting module. “You can drill all the way down to one user, one flow, or one step in a flow,” she says. “You can get as granulated as you want.

“An important thing to remember is that ImageRight is not going to replace half your staff,” Treen cautions. “What’s changed is that we’re not dealing with paper anymore. We have the same number of underwriters despite the fact that our volume has increased. We’re saving money because we don’t have to allocate square footage to a file room anymore. Then there’s the office supplies associated with a paper-based system—labels, file folders, etc. We aren’t buying them anymore. With our increased efficiency and improved productivity, ImageRight has paid for itself.” *

For more information:
ImageRight
Web site: www.imageright.com