A Century Old and as New as Today Today's Western & Southern Financial Group Works at Internet Speeds

The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company (www.westernsouthernlife.com) draws on both its 115-year history and the most modern technology. This keeps the firm, along with its affiliates, Columbus Life Insurance, IFS Financial Services, Inc. and Capital Analysts, at the leading edge of life insurance, annuities and financial services.

On the technology side, document and content management -- including workflow and business-process improvement - play a major role in the rising efficiencies and operational profits at the Western & Southern Financial Group. Its developer, provider, and integrator in this arena is Optical Image Technology, Inc. with its DocFinity® suite of software for imaging, workflow, and related technologies.

The gains in business processing are impressive by any measure. According to Thomas Holdridge, vice president of underwriting, in the last few years:

• The time between receipt of an application for insurance and the date a resulting policy is mailed shrank from 28 days to 19.
• The average cost of underwriting a policy fell from $390 in 1996 to $275 in 2003.
• Customer satisfaction, measured on a five-point scale, rose from three to over four.

In addition, Senior Vice President of Insurance Operations James Teeters reports that the cost of processing new business fell by 30 percent while staffing for policy services fell almost nine percent.

Numbers also testify to the significant size of the solutions. The Western & Southern Financial Group employs 861 workflows to handle almost 20 million images (as of 2003). At any given moment, over 10,000 jobs are active in queues. Customer service workers answer questions in seconds about policies that are over 20 years old. The records-retention schedule runs over 100 years.

The recent history of Western and Southern Life is rich in technology, and its notable success is based on a measured, progressive rollout of imaging and workflow.

Starting Practically

Western & Southern Financial Group's headquarters cover a city block in downtown Cincinnati, but its subsidiary that markets annuities through banks, IFS Financial Services, Inc., is a block away. IFS' back office processes ran on the parent company's mainframe, and couriers carried large quantities of paper between the two sites in all kinds of weather. Faced with inefficiency, rain and snow, the Chief Technical Officer knew that document automation would improve the situation. His team scrutinized and analyzed proposals from three highly-competitive vendors. The winner was OIT. A key criterion was OIT's open-architecture software for future integration.

IFS served as a pilot installation for imaging and workflow. The staff scanned applications for annuities as they came in from the banks. "We took OIT's solution right out of the box," recalls Rita Roeper, assistant vice president and director of Data Management Services. "The only modification came when our vice president of annuity operations objected to double searches, for data and images. "At that point," she continues, "We modified our software so that images would come up when we initiated a search for data."

That was the first of many integration points with OIT's software.

Almost immediately upon DocFinity's installation at IFS, the physical transportation of paper ceased. Soon the staff recognized the possibility of automating other workflows. New applications including withdrawals from annuities, name changes, loans, death claims, and others processes quickly joined the first automated solution in expediting business.

Columbus Life

Shortly thereafter, in 1995, the CTO addressed inefficiencies at one of the group's member companies, Columbus Life. Corporate management decided to move the offices 100-plus miles from the state capitol to Cincinnati. The choice for efficiency brought at least two obstacles. One was that few staff members chose to move with the company. The other obstacle was years of records stored on a microfilm system that was fraught with weaknesses. For years, a staff of 10 had photographed the paper and developed the film. Then they cut the film and mounted it in jackets.

The CTO assigned Roeper to bring imaging to Columbus Life. "It took us two months to get the equipment purchased and installed in Columbus, connecting to Cincinnati with a T1 line," she relates. "We wrote Visual Basic routines to transfer film from Sunrise scanners into OIT's database. For each frame in the back file, we indexed with fill-in typing for each type of document." Once backfile conversion began, Roeper initiated workflow in the New Business Department.

"In March, 1996, we stopped the micro-filming process and went straight to imaging," she adds. "It was a challenging conversion, given the geographic distance, as processes began moving to the new location."

With many of Columbus Life's employees not making the move, Roeper insisted on documenting the business processes before the final relocation date so they could be automated in Cincinnati.

"We moved in June of 1996," she reports, "and by the end of 1997, all the back office processes were image-enabled. Today the whole system is done with electronic images, and our use of OIT solutions has grown steadily ever since the move. We kept expanding the integration points, refining the business processes, and making improvements. We converted our paper forms into electronic templates, and now we pre-fill the data, automatically index, and import them into OIT. "

An important example of the new efficiencies comes from the underwriting department. Underwriters of life insurance order medical exams before accepting an application for insurance. Traditionally, there is a lengthy wait for the test results. Now, Columbus Life's contract laboratory enters exam results directly into the insurer's database, simultaneously sending images of supporting documents. Each night, Columbus Life pulls the images and indexing information into its own workflows. The next morning, underwriters find the newly completed applications in their work queues, complete with the vital lab reports.

Roeper says the company continues to identify ways to integrate business processes with the DocFinity software. "With an open database and a programming staff, you can surround yourself with DocFinity software to improve business. Wherever you have the creative ideas, you can do it. If you can envision it, you can have it. Integration isn't the issue, it is simply a matter of resources and time," she concludes.

Multiplying the Size

After refining the processes at Columbus Life, it was time to move document automation and workflow to The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company. With 2.3 million policyholders, it is roughly 10 times the size of Columbus Life. Experience gained from the initial installation created improved input, indexing with barcodes, and the automating of vendors. In 2002, The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company started converting, on demand, millions of backfiles.

The next 12 months saw a three-phase rollout, each averaging 40 workflows. The number of images quickly rose to 17 million, and Roeper expects to add 12 million per year until the backfile conversion is complete in about seven years. The pilot's optical disk storage media gave way to magnetic storage and a Storage Area Network with a backup SAN offsite.

An example from among the hundreds of workflows comes from Senior Underwriter Joanne Greene: "For smaller-amount applications, our underwriters make independent decisions from their desktop. But when applications are approved for higher amounts, we flow the file to a second individual for review and cosign. While imaging has not necessarily made our evaluations faster, if you factor in transport, stacking, and queue time -- from start to finish -- the whole process is definitely faster for our customers. As a group, we much prefer images over paper."

Thomas Holdridge uses the workflow reports to gauge workloads, productivity, and accuracy. He audits every underwriter. The workflow also protects against lost files. "Any pending file gets a 10-day followup," he reports. "It goes into a 'tracer bucket' to get it flowing again."

Cyber Life Insurance

A certain population prefers buying life insurance over the Worldwide Web instead of meeting with a salesperson. With the help of DocFinity software, The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company pioneered this niche market and leads the movement.

"Imaging is critical to this channel," explains Lisa Fangman, assistant vice president and director of new business for the Western and Southern Life Insurance Company. "Internet buyers want quick decisions, and we have to be quicker than the competition. The [Web insurance] malls get basic data, and that gets pushed to our client data system in our call center. It also goes to the mainframe and imaging. The data center contacts the client to refine and fill out the application." Then the company sends the applicant paper forms and schedules a medical exam.

"A paramedic picks up the application when doing the medical exam," Fangman continues. "At the end of the day, the lab scans the application and sends the images with the lab results."

Back at the office, workflow takes the data and documents to an underwriter who orders any necessary, supplemental tests. When the required information has arrived, workflow assembles and presents it to the underwriter. He or she refines the quote and flows the offer to a processor who dispatches a policy. Electronic signatures are on the near horizon.

"We will do about 20,000 'e-Term' applications in 2003," Fangman reports. "The average face amount requested is about $400,000. We have to keep our costs down because term insurance is very competitive. Our efficiencies come from our back office.

"Imaging lets us use electronic access to documents to provide customer service over the Web," she continues. "We go through XML transfer, which is a tremendous advantage. We manage our workflow with dynamic, but predefined, reports. I track the number of open cases, and a flag pops up when I have to intervene.

" Additionally," Fangman concludes, "Imaging gives us lots of leverage in terms of alternate ways to use our vendors, who are going more and more electronic."

Striving for Happy Customers

The aforementioned rise in customer satisfaction comes at a time when the imaging, workflow, and report management tools reach increasing numbers of the Western & Southern Financial Group workers who interact directly with the public. The Client Relationship Center, for example, embraced the automation, passing their ease on to their callers. The 23 representatives feel their service is better. Since images are instantly available, there are fewer callbacks. "Retrieval is much easier," comments Jeanenne Stamper, manager of the Client Relationship Center. "Information is at our fingertips - there is no more looking through boxes of paper. It is less frustrating with fewer interruptions, allowing us continuous focus on a file. Misplaced files are less likely. We save time since we do not have to wait for paper files to be pulled. As a result, we deliver better customer service to our clients."

Maureen Firestone, assistant vice president and director of insurance operations reports similar customer satisfaction in the Claims Department, which process about 1000 claims per week, and the Annuities Operations Department, which receives between 100 and 200 applications per day. The public's top criterion for satisfaction with insurance companies is speed in processing claims and applications, so the automation is a key to happy customers.

Expanding Solutions

Western & Southern's use of document automation expanded steadily from 1996 to the present, and there is no end to that expansion in sight. As traditionally-run departments saw the effectiveness of document management and workflow, a clamor began for expansion of the system. "Previously, all of our imaging was related to our policy areas," Roeper notes, "but now we are getting requests from the other departments like licensing [where the processes are complicated because each state has its own regulations] and accounting. We have told each business unit that they need to do a cost/benefit analysis to help prioritize their request into our work program."

Even the original document installations are fluid as new technologies make the solutions faster and more comprehensive. New ways to exploit the Internet are in the near future.

Roeper dubs OIT the continuing document management vendor of choice. "Their reliability is excellent," she opines. "We have never been down due to OIT software.

We recently did a business continuity project, identifying the critical functions that the business processes use," she continues. "If we had a disaster, OIT would be one of the first systems to bring back up."

Roeper describes her company's healthy relationship with its vendor: "OIT personnel, right up to their president and CEO, Scott Buchart, take a personal interest in us. When we first did Columbus Life and needed less linear workflows, we brought Scott in and had him try to define the workflows we needed. He went back to his developers and had a new product to us within weeks.

"They listen to their customers," she concludes. "We think of them more as a business partner than as a vendor. Their development team was like an extension of my development team. We have a great working relationship."

The Western and Southern Life Insurance Company illustrates how modern technology and century-old stability can work together. Hand-in-hand, they deliver peace of mind for policyholders and success for the company.

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Copyright 2003, all rights reserved

Gordon E.J. Hoke is Vice President at eVisory Consulting and Contributing Editor to Transform Magazine. Balancing writing and consulting, he helps identify and report on successful document/content solutions. He can be reached at gordon.hoke @evisory.com and (507) 534-2293.

Automating Financial Services

For one of Western & Southern Financial Group's financial services subsidiary, Capital Analysts, Inc. (www.capitalanalysts.com), document automation is mission critical. "It has become such a fabric of our company! It is part of the air we breathe!" exclaims Jack Crosby, vice president of information systems. Capital Analysts installed OIT software in 1998 and did two major upgrades in the next five years.

"We cost-justified it on reducing our paper storage needs, workspace needs, and the reduction in printing," Crosby explains, "but the biggest thing is the improvement in customer service. Our field relationship representatives were bogged down in callbacks. Now the fulfillment is almost immediate. You can't attach a price to that."

Susan Neeld, director of resource development reports that customer service representatives respond to an average of 75 calls daily; up to half of those require retrieval from the imaging system.

In addition to imaging and workflow, Capital Analysts extracts high value from DocFinity's enterprise report management software (commonly dubbed ERM or COLD). It moves the traditionally-printed reports into imaging, auto-indexing them by looking on the reports themselves. This eliminates the need to print, scan and index them. The whole process is automatic. The reports range from three to 2000 pages.

"I access numerous reports for many reasons," Neeld relates. "I use the commission report when talking with our reps about their statements. I look at the customer error reports, the trade reports, and others along with scanned images like selling agreements. That used to be a tremendous feat, trying to physically locate a selling agreement. Now they are in OIT, and I find any document information quickly. It is part of everything I do.

"The last time we were audited, the auditors wanted the commission statements for a year," she continues. "When the request was made, I said, 'Do you know what you're asking? You want thousands of pages. So when they came out, instead of filling a room with paper, we just showed them how to use OIT software."

Neeld is particularly pleased with the ease of retrieving scanned images that document the information in a report. "I can literally pull up the report and the image at the same time. I just put them at the bottom of my monitor and switch from one to the other at will."

Crosby attributes part of that ease to DocFinity's timesaving Power Indexing facility. The solution uses 10 indexing fields. "We spend the time to put the indexes in, so it is a little time consuming up front," he reveals, "but the payback is in the retrieval. We do some manual indexing, but Power Indexing takes a document and pre-populates a lot of indexes. We were going to go to a third full-time scanner, but Power Indexing made that unnecessary."

While exact allocations are unavailable, Crosby attributes much of Capital Analysts success to OIT's document technology. Since 1997, revenues have tripled and transaction volumes have increased by a factor of five. "We have grown a lot, and we have been able to support that growth with the same back office staff," he declares. "We love it."

"OIT software rules our world," Neeld agrees. "The capabilities and efficiencies. . .I can not imagine any other way. It puts everything, all our information, at our fingertips."

For more information or to schedule a demonstration, please Contact DocFinity now.