By Jonathan McGrew
For many people, paper documents are still a way of life. We need them to archive our records, keep track of our spending, watch out for our retirement and monitor our health. Technology has been shifting the desired delivery method of customer communications from paper to electronic delivery methods. This trend has continued to grow as environmentally conscious consumers look for ways that they can reduce the impact on their surroundings. With this shift have also come challenges including when and how to prevent documents to be printed when a customer or provider requests e-delivery as well as how to give people access to the electronic documents consistently and efficiently.
For document providers these challenges are complicated by production and workflow systems that use legacy systems and native print file formats like AFP and Xerox Metacode. When an organization wants to “turn off” print and delivery documents electronically, they have to find a solution that will integrate with their current print and mail operations. That solution in today’s economy needs to have the ability to integrate quickly, seamlessly and affordably. But how can this be done when many production and workflow environments have many different applications and document composition software in use?
The answer is an open architecture designed to integrate without the need to upgrade to new and costly software or hardware. Crawford Technologies has been providing paper suppression and e-presentment solutions for our customers for over 15 years. More than just a software company, CrawfordTech is a solutions company that works with our customers to find the most innovative ways to solve their complex business problems.
Recently, we were able to help an insurance customer of ours provide a paperless solution for their reps around the United States. The need was driven by organizational goals to reduce printing and shipping costs in order to lessen the company’s environmental footprint. On the broker side, many sought to work in a paperless environment and were looking to the home office to provide a way to move from printed files to e-delivery. The challenges were how to turn off the print and deliver the electronic versions of the documents in the most efficient and useful method for the brokers.
Find out how The Economical Insurance Group (TEIG) chose CrawfordTech solutions to make e-presentment to their brokers possible while reusing existing pieces of their architecture. Read the full Case Study here.
Looking for additional examples of print suppression and e-presentment in an insurance industry application? Be sure to check out The Dominion case study that walks through another example of how to turn off print and deliver those documents electronically. In this case, it included the launch of a new online document repository. Read the full Case Study here.
