Five Tips for Effective Indexing Across Your Enterprise

What your document management vendor should be telling you

By Harold Hockman, Director of Professional Services, Optical Image Technology, Inc.

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Whether your work relates to issuing policies, handling claims, underwriting, loan processing, billing, or other operations, you have undoubtedly heard about the benefits of an electronic document management system (EDMS). A transition to paperless processes can improve document access, retention, compliance measures, information security, process automation, and overall efficiency throughout your entire organization. Just as importantly, it can also positively impact policyholder services and satisfaction.

When you talk to vendors about a transition to an EDMS, they usually tend to accentuate the positive. By decreasing paper, insurers are able to increase their capabilities without adding additional staff. The money that is saved, coupled with the ability to shorten turnaround time, usually ensures both a quick ROI and an improved competitive standing. With paper-based processes, it can take hours to locate documents and make policy changes; an EDMS shortens this cycle to minutes.

Between the success stories and the transition to an EDMS, however, insurers often experience a harsh reality about which most document management vendors do not like to talk. When it comes to the process of indexing your documents for efficient retrieval, too many vendors adopt an attitude of “if they don’t ask, we don’t have to tell”. This is unfortunate, as a lack of understanding about the indexing process can sabotage an organization’s efforts to transition to an EDMS.

Indexing is complicated. For many insurers, it is the most difficult aspect of eliminating paper processes. Successful indexing involves foresight, communication, and an organized approach. By talking about the struggles that are associated with the indexing process, we can mitigate many of its challenges. Included below are five suggestions to help with effective indexing across your enterprise.

1. Think big.

The retrieval needs of individuals may be vastly different from those of the enterprise as a whole. As you formulate an indexing plan, consider the requirements of your entire organization. Your indexing plan will directly influence the architecture of your document management solution. Consequently, the plan needs to be one of the most well-thought-out parts of the process. The more thorough your planning is, the more successful your outcome will be.

Organizations approach the planning phase differently, as indexing schemes vary greatly depending upon the characteristics of an organization. For some insurers, planning is a fourfold process. Initially, they must take an inventory of every bit of paper that is processed within the organization. This might involve documents, forms, faxes, and images, and may even transcend into other media such as email messages. Secondly, they come up with meaningful groupings to categorize the paper. Groupings might involve underwriting, claims, HR, agency support, or other categories, and they are specific according to the needs of the organization.

The third step of the planning process usually involves listing relevant information for each document within a group. Information might include the type of document, its lifespan, source, and information about the document. Consider your organization’s document retention and destruction needs during this planning phase. If more than one department will be accessing the same document, make sure that you have rules in place to prohibit the accidental destruction of that document. Finally, it is helpful for organizations to talk about how users retrieve documents as part of the paper process before they make a transition to EDMS. This helps insurers formulate meaningful (and unique) index values for the different documents. A fundamental consideration is security. During the planning phase, it is important to design the indexing plan in a way that excludes unauthorized viewers. As organizations consider making documents more accessible, they also need to plan to limit access to authorized staff only.

A common pitfall occurs when organizations implement an EDMS within one department with the hope of later rolling it out to the rest of the enterprise. The plan is a sound one; however, businesses sometimes customize an indexing structure so that it is specific to only one department. Later, there is no easy way to bring other departments (and the necessary security) into the indexing scheme.

Clearly, when it comes to indexing, a myopic viewpoint can be problematic. Another pitfall occurs when companies take on too much too quickly, particularly if a project is more ambitious than resources permit. This mindset is understandable: Businesses are eager to receive the benefits of an EDMS, but are sometimes hesitant or unwilling to take small steps to get there. The temptation is to roll out an EDMS to a number of departments simultaneously, without considering the different needs of the different departments (or the dependency that some departments may have on the processing abilities of others). With effective planning, these pitfalls can be avoided.

2. Collaborate and communicate.

It is imperative that you include representatives from every department—managers, end users, and IT—as you plan your indexing scheme. Open communications during this phase help business professionals to learn about the capabilities of the technology. At the same time, IT professionals have the opportunity to learn as much as they can about the business processes. This collaboration is a critical component of a successful indexing scheme. If departments have a need to access the same documentation, it is during the collaboration phase that they can come up with a standardized index scheme so that they all have the ability to retrieve that documentation. If documents are not being shared, it is not as critical to have the same indexing scheme.

During the collaborative stage, some organizations find it helpful to have representatives from different departments verbally walk through the process of finding a document. Do staff members search using policy numbers, claim numbers, names, or other criteria? Members of different departments should be willing to listen and ready to compromise. Open communication between management and end users may help to narrow down the number of indexing keys, which promotes quicker retrieval and better efficiency.

3. Find a happy medium.

Paradoxically, two common pitfalls during a transition to an EDMS are overindexing and underindexing. The first scenario is usually a result of inadequate communication with your end users. If your company designates too many indexes, it could dramatically slow the retrieval process. This can be avoided if end users are consulted during the planning process, and it will allow you to avoid the implementation of extraneous data that no one will search for and no one really cares about.

Underindexing occurs when insurers do not take future searching needs into account. For example, if your search criteria only include policy numbers and customer names, a situation might occur in which a user has to search for information within an incomplete file (which might not include a policy number). To avoid this pitfall, try to include policyholder name, zip code, SSN, and a unique differentiator as index values. Although it is possible that indexing personnel may complain about requirements for additional fields to be entered, the benefits of having the right data to associate documents for all processes will greatly outweigh any initial perceived inconveniences. To simplify this process, and to reduce the potential for errors, your ultimate goal should be to configure your system to automatically populate your index keys after a unique differentiator is entered into an indexing field.

If departments are sharing documents, they may have a few indexes that are common among different departments. Items that are common should start out with the same indexing configuration so that structure is consistent regardless of which department is retrieving information. For example, if you are using Policy Number, Name, and SSN as indexing fields, it would benefit you to keep those fields consistent among departments. Organizations often concatenate numbers to create unique identifiers.

4. Find a personalized solution.

Ultimately, your goal is to be as efficient as possible. For some organizations, that means coming up with an indexing scheme that returns a direct hit during retrieval. For others, it may mean simplifying the indexing process so that the returned information merely narrows the search. Insurers may have hundreds of document types; as such, the task of indexing can be excruciatingly difficult. It can be helpful to group document types that serve similar functions within a process.

It is important also to consider your economies of scale: If there are 100 people in your organization, and you delegate one staff member to scanning and indexing, you are using 1% of your workforce. But if you have 10 people in your organization and you dedicate one staff member to scanning and indexing, you are using 10% of your workforce. Consequently, smaller organizations may want to simplify their indexing schemes so that they do not wear out their resources. Organizations need to consider solutions that will best suit their individual needs.

5. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

You have probably heard the adage that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Despite some of the difficulties that are associated with indexing, however, there is no question that the benefits of an EDMS are well worth the transition. If the idea of implementing a robust indexing scheme seems intimidating, consider ending the silence that surrounds this issue. If you talk with your document management vendor about your concerns, you can alleviate much of the difficulty that is associated with a transition to paperless processes.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, consider taking advantage of your vendor’s experience in the indexing realm. Many vendors offer professional services, which may include sending experienced staff on-site to your organization to learn about your processes and to offer recommendations. They have the knowledge to analyze your business process and work with you to help you meet your business goals. Professional service specialists have the industry experience to find an indexing structure that suits your company’s needs, and can provide you with a number of options that are based on best practices. They can also provide suggestions on how to automate certain aspects of the indexing process, which will significantly simplify your operations.

Initiating a dialogue about the indexing process is the first step in what could be either a smooth or a rocky journey. By recognizing a potential hurdle to a transition to paperless processing, you can take proactive measures to alleviate the complexities that are associated with indexing. It is never too soon or too late to start that conversation.

To end the silence on the subject of indexing, or to find out more about how an EDMS can help your organization optimize insurance processes and improve policyholder services, please contact Optical Image Technology (http://www.docfinity.com) at 814.238.0038 or email info@docfinity.com.

 

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