Technology

A company of firsts

Computers by Design offers a document management solution to agencies of all sizes

By Nancy Doucette

Let’s face it. Innovation in the agency technology arena doesn’t make the pages of Fast Company or Wired. But within this industry niche, imaginative software engineers deliver cool tools that improve efficiency and therefore enhance an agency’s bottom line.

Tampa-based Computers by Design (CBD) has been doing just that since 1990. A visit to the CBD Web site (www.cbdi.com) provides a chronology of “firsts” which the organization has developed exclusively for independent agents and brokers. “It would appear that we’ve had a pretty good run,” says Steven Finch, with a smile in his voice.

Finch is executive vice president and one of the founders of CBD. “When we update that portion of our Web site each year, it’s interesting to see that we continue to be on the forefront of technology. We introduce something and a couple of years later, it becomes mainstream,” he says.

In October 2007, CBD was acquired by ImageRight, a Vertafore company. (See “Happy Campers” in the November 2007 issue of Rough Notes for a discussion of ImageRight.) According to Finch, joining forces with ImageRight afforded CBD more resources, which has enabled the vendor to broaden its target customers. CBD now markets its self-hosted or hosted document management product—CBDDoc—to agencies of all sizes. “We have a product for anybody who has an agency management system and is in the business of servicing customers,” he asserts.

“CBD continues to exist post-acquisition by ImageRight,” Finch continues. “The only thing that’s visibly different is that we are Computers by Design—an ImageRight Business. We still do everything that CBD used to do—document management, extranet services, and submission solutions as well as all our agency technology services.

“In addition, by way of the ImageRight product, we now have another opportunity to introduce new solutions to agents that will be commonplace in a couple of years,” he says. “Concepts like ‘real-time workload management,’ which today requires a bit of explanation, will be on everyone’s radar once agents realize there’s a solution out there.”

Prior to the acquisition, Finch says CBDDoc integrated with all the familiar agency management systems—AMS, Applied Systems, XDTI Nexsure and Ebix. He doesn’t expect that to change. “From a document management standpoint, integration is one of the most important aspects,” he points out.

Integration was a key consideration for the three agencies we contacted while researching this story. But what these agencies gained once they implemented CBDDoc went beyond improved efficiencies.

Trial and error

Finding the right document management solution was a trial and error—and error— experience for Ed Olsson Jr., director of IT for the Treiber Group, LLC, of Garden City, New York. Treiber has a staff of about 160 that is divided between its retail operation (about 90 people) and its wholesale side (about 60 people.) Administrative makes up the balance.

He launched—and scrapped—two solutions in the mid-1990s. By 1999, he had decided to abandon the idea altogether. “At the time, we were trying to scan documents,” he remembers. “It wasn’t document management back then. The products we tried were certainly good enough, but they were complicated, and they didn’t integrate with our management system. Our staff hated them.”

In 1999 the agency switched to Sagitta Browser. The following year, Olsson attended HighTecc, a three-day gathering that offers presentations by experts in insurance agency operations and technology. He met Steven Finch, who was on the program demonstrating the newly released CBDDoc. “We had the opportunity to re-architect the product from scratch for Y2K,” Finch recalls. He introduced CBDDoc as a document management system that provided a central spot for scanned documents as well as the growing number of e-mails, e-faxes and digital pictures that agencies were accumulating. “It was a true document management system meant to hold all of that type of various media from day one.”

What intrigued Olsson about the CBDDoc solution was the idea that Finch referred to as “detached indexing.”

“We could begin using CBDDoc right away because we wouldn’t disrupt the workflow of the CSRs,” Olsson says. Paper would go through the mailroom to the CSRs’ desks just as it always had. The CSRs would manage the paper as they had always done. Once the transaction is complete, the paper is “profiled” automatically by CBDDoc—capturing the client code, policy number and activity code, assigning a profile number, and creating a small “temp file” on the server hosting CBDDoc. From there the paper goes to the scanning bin. The scanned documents are matched with the profile numbers and stored in the CBDDoc database. Finally, the paper is boxed up according to date. It’s held for six months and then it’s destroyed.

Treiber’s retail operation went live on CBDDoc in January 2001. The wholesale side went live in 2003. How has that impacted the organization’s bottom line? “Commercial real estate here runs about $25 to $35 per square foot. We gained back 1,200 square feet,” Olsson reports. “We got rid of every one of our file rooms. We have no more off-site storage. CBDDoc is our file system. So we’re compliant with the requirement that we retain seven years of files.”

A lot has changed since Olsson had to scrap the early scanning solutions that his staff hated. A lot has changed since he eased Treiber into document management without disrupting existing workflows. “Folks ‘on the floor’ are asking for early capture capabilities,” he says. That would mean that no paper arrives at the CSR’s desk—a significant workflow change. But with most carriers sending policies electronically, it’s a logical step.

Less is more

“When we decided to move beyond transactional filing and begin managing our documents electronically, one of our original objectives was to become less paper dependent,” says Cyndy Smith, vice president and director of technology at Haylor, Freyer & Coon, Inc., headquartered in Syracuse, New York.

With 10 primary locations in New York state and more than 245 employees, Haylor had a lot of paper to contend with and was using transactional filing to keep it in order. But once a document was filed, it took time to get it back. She explains that a request had to go to the file room and the document had to be retrieved from the T-file date file. “It was a manageable workflow but we had visited some agencies, as well as carriers, that were using electronic document management. Having electronic access to the information on the desktop made sense to us,” she says. “It would increase our efficiency and our ability to respond more quickly to our clients.”

Smith says Haylor, Freyer & Coon started working with Computers by Design in 1993 when CBD implemented networks for the organization. Nonetheless, Smith invited several document management vendors to demonstrate their systems. “It was a unanimous decision that CBDDoc was the best fit for our organization,” she recalls.

Haylor is now in its fifth year on CBDDoc. “We have a centralized server in our home office,” she says. “All the documents are saved here on our primary CBDDoc server. So the documents aren’t spread out over the wide area network. Everybody can access documents from any location. In the branch offices, it’s no different than if they’re sitting in Syracuse.”

The organization has achieved its objective of being less paper dependent. And that proved to be especially important when a fire broke out in a village where one of the branch offices was located. “We had seven years of paper in that branch office,” Smith says. “Thankfully, the fire didn’t reach our office but if it had, we would have lost seven years worth of paper.

“There’s a disaster recovery component to CBDDoc,” she continues. “If there’s power here in our Syracuse office, we can access the information from anywhere. Of course, we do nightly back-ups. The CBDDoc data-base is standard, so should something happen, it can be quickly restored.”

Road trip

Ellen Dale, CIC, believes in due diligence. As automation systems director for Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance, LLC, in Memphis, Tennessee, a 105-person agency, she investigated several document management systems. As she narrowed the field of candidates, she took a group from Lipscomb & Pitts to visit a Houston, Texas, agency to observe firsthand how they used CBDDoc.

By the end of the visit, she was convinced that CBDDoc was the right solution for Lipscomb & Pitts, and that they would need dual monitors to fully utilize the system. “With just one monitor, it’s too much back and forth,” Dale says. “Especially if you’re policy checking. In fact, policy checkers should have three monitors,” she continues. “You have to check the policy against the proposal and the application. You don’t want to print out the paper, so you need to see the information on three screens.”

Prior to installing CBDDoc in August 2006, Dale contacted AMS Consulting to assist with preparing the agency for the implementation. Her consultants suggested that the agency implement gradually. So she decided to begin with personal lines—which represents about 5% of the agency’s revenue. Next came the small commercial unit, then the rest of the commercial lines teams. “It took about six months to get everyone who was going to use CBDDoc on it,” Dale reports.

But before any of that could occur, the agency had to go through what CBD’s Finch calls “personalization.” “We gather a small group of representatives from the agency—people who can build procedures, define workflows and implement those workflows,” he explains. “We meet—two days is average—and decide what the agency is not going to put into CBDDoc. Knowing that defines everything else.

“Typically, you want CBDDoc to capture the important parts of the client record that are going to (1) help you service your client, (2) protect you from E&O and (3) improve efficiencies,” he continues.

“We decide what the document is going to be called, what transactions it’s going to link to, and when it is going to be captured.

“This is one of our differentiators. We won’t let you go to the next step until you actually have personali-zation. In the past, clients who didn’t successfully complete this process weren’t happy with the results,” Finch says.

That differentiator made the difference for Dale. “Steven understood that how we named these documents was the key to everything. I appreciated that he was concerned enough about our satisfaction with the product that he didn’t want to sell it to us unless we did this phase correctly,” she notes.

“Ours is a tightly controlled implementation,” Finch adds. “An agency can’t say they want their files set up like the successful agency across the street. Each agency has to decide for itself.”

CBD’s Other Products and Solutions

CBDScan A simpler solution than CBDDoc to scan and index documents into an electronically managed format.

CBD Extranet Services A group of Web services that provides for secure collaboration among agents, clients and carriers.

CBD Integration Services A solution-based approach to network design and support.

For more information:
Computers by Design
Web site: www.cbdi.com