Enhanced Customer Communications

The Challenge

The firm committed itself to a major business reengineering process known internally as the Pyramid Project. The firm’s main requirement was to consolidate all business processes, from the generation of a ratings request to sending out an invoice, into a single managed solution. It was clear that an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution was called for.

However, something more than a repository was necessary. The large number of documents in motion needed an automated tool in order to automate the output management function thereby increasing the productivity of the firm’s highly leveraged associates. One specific requirement when a client requested a rating was to simultaneously send an email notification to the account rep as the invoice for the rating was submitted to print as part of the business process integration.

The Solutions

Using IBM software products, the ratings firm converted all manual and automated business processes to a single unified workflow with IBM’s FileNet Content Manager platform as the backbone architecture.

As in any financial services application, the IT staff realized that valuable knowledge worker time and process time was being wasted by not automating the submission of documents to the designated output channel. The decision was made to standardize on CrawfordTech’s Riptide as the ECM Output Management solution supporting the Pyramid project.

With CrawfordTech’s Riptide as the primary output management component, ratings related content is now easily accessed and delivered across all business units associated with the firm.

Content is accumulated through several internal and external channels, indexed and then stored within P8’s Content Engine repository. Using several key business applications interfacing with P8, users request content and the delivery method they need. Requests are automatically sent to Riptide which retrieves the content from one of the P8 repositories. Using parameters within the request, Riptide determines the output destination and the jobs are automatically converted to the proper format for delivery.

One of the major workflow enhancements put in place triggers when a rating is completed. The workflow process uses CrawfordTech’s Riptide to simultaneously send a copy of the invoice via email to the client’s account rep as well as to print for distribution to the client improving both cash flow and customer satisfaction.

Upon completion of distribution, packets assembled by Riptide are re-declared back into IBM’s Filenet P8 object store for future retrieval in compliance with Information Governance principles.

Results

The IBM/CrawfordTech portion of the Pyramid Project resulted in a seamless deployment with improved productivity and a high degree of customer satisfaction. All of the integrated document processes are flowing with a greater degree of automation than without Riptide. Ratings requests are fulfilled more quickly; invoices are sent out sooner impacting cash flow. The side benefits are the elimination of expensive user errors and cost avoidance due to improved resource utilization.

At a technical level, document processes execute faster, resources, like MS Office licenses are not tied up, and information governance compliance is assured as new instances of document assemblies are declared to P8 automatically.

The Solutions

A fundamental role of the IBM ECM platform is the delivery of active content in motion for improved business value and reduced costs. In this case the new output management system provides a complete start-to-finish process for all business dealings within the firm. By effectively shortening the time between ratings request and client invoice, the IBM and CrawfordTech solution has collaboratively improved the firm’s customer service and cash flow.