The start of a large-scale innovation process - from output to customer communication
Developments in the insurance market
Just like any other insurer, De Goudse is coming to grips with a drastically changing environment. The development with the greatest impact is the shift towards e-business - insurance policies are increasingly taken out electronically and issued to a broker or an end customer in electronic format. This requires instant compilation and display of documents. Electronic documents have to meet ever stricter requirements, as demand for this form of documentation continues to grow. That will eventually lead to paper flows running dry. “I'm expecting a massive drop in mail volumes in the coming three years, and print queues will inevitably remain empty in the future,” says John van der Lans, Facility Manager at De Goudse.
Bottlenecks - fragmentation and dependence on IT
There are two bottlenecks within the organization at De Goudse Verzekeringen that are making it difficult to meet both customer needs and e-business requirements. First, their application landscape for document production is fragmented. The level of investment required to be able to keep up with developments is considerable. “Whenever you make changes in such a complex application landscape, you're facing two risks - either you overlook certain applications, or one will topple as you implement the change. The process involved in changing content in letters and other documents is also far too lengthy. The necessity of involving the IT department means that you have to consider, at a very early stage, which document changes are required in a certain release,” John van der Lans points out.
Changing course - a customer communications platform
In order to remove these bottlenecks and be able to positively tap into all the developments, the document systems are now being revamped. Not a big-bang overhaul where everything is changed round in one fell swoop, but rather a phased approach, tying in with existing systems. De Goudse and Aia Software share a vision of existing applications linking up with a central customer communications platform - a platform where all the output produced by the different applications converges, leading to the best possible customer communication. In other words, the realization and implementation of the required communication strategy. Inspired by many years of successful collaboration, De Goudse and Aia have joined forces in deploying the new ITP Customer Communications Management product to make this platform a reality. “The basic idea behind the new set-up is that everything that relates to document production and document distribution is brought together. Whenever changes are required, these will not have to be made separately in every single application.”
Results of the first phase
The first phase has now been concluded, and produced the basic platform on which ITP/CCM has now been installed and configured. This also involved the building of web services to access the back-office system (such as the insurance policy administration), as well as the configuration of document templates and communication settings in ITP/CCM for a specific process within De Goudse's life insurance unit.
Completed features
With the roll-out of this new solution, De Goudse staff now benefit from uniform handling of documents produced, regardless of whether these documents were created using an (online) interactive letter database or using (system) batch production. In both cases, the user can count on the following centrally configured features:
- consistent environment,
- automated archiving,
- creation of copies for third parties,
- alternative routing of documents for sending through broker or employer, using an additional address label,
- bar code for embedding,
- split up into sets based on size of envelope or parcel,
- clustering output for the same address.
“The biggest advantage is that it is very easy for us as users to make changes to a letter. This used to require the assistance of the IT department, and was very time consuming; now we can do it ourselves in most cases,” Van der Lans says. And that means that the bottleneck of slow turnaround has already been ironed out during the project's first phase. The second phase of the project is now ready to get under way, and will initially integrate more processes of other product groups and more types of documents, and add more features at a later stage.
Lessons learned
Van der Lans also has a few tips for anyone who's looking to implement a similar change:
- Make sure you have the business on board early on in the change process - don't turn it into a pure IT project, despite the prevalence of IT content.
- Make sure current output is subjected to close scrutiny.
- Move document management from the IT department to the business.
- Most documents can be generated quickly, and only the exceptions are complex; you will need to call in the pros for those!