Alm Brand Group the full story
IT-manager Carsten Parbo, Alm. Brand:
"ITP gives us a document solution, which combines our basic AS/400 systems with PC word processing facilities."
Alm. Brand group is engaged in general insurance, life insurance, international re insurance, banking and financing activity.
Alm. Brand is a Danish enterprise, and with more than 1,700 employees it is one of the largest Danish insurance and banking groups. A third of the employees work at the head office in Copenhagen - the others work at offices and branches all over the country.
The question:
"For many years our AS/400 comprised a solution which automatically generated standard letters and documents as an integral part of our life insurance system.
It was a sufficient enough solution but today's requirements, more modern design and the use of modern word processing facilities, were increasingly difficult to fulfil.
Therefore we have chosen for ITP, Intelligent Text Processing.
Using ITP we obtain efficient and automatic mass production of letters with dynamic data merged from the AS/400 along with sophisticated design and individualised data controlled letter wordings" says Carsten Parbo, who is the IT manager of the life and pension division of insurance and banking group Alm. Brand.
The life insurance system produces many complex letters and documents, which often include highly individualised contents.
The letters and documents reflect both the policy holder's actual insurance cover and the actual insurance event which provides the background for printing the letter.
Convincing demo
"We had considered it at length how to get on in the way of a more up-to-date document handling solution. But not until ADFO Danmark some three years ago introduced us to ITP.
The ITP concept was exactly what we were looking for. It was suited for our system basis, and it could provide our documents with the required extra dimensions.
We decided to test the product in our own system. We defined two typical tasks and staged a 3-day workshop to which the Dutch supplier appeared with two consultants.
The workshop turned out to be such a success that the decision to choose ITP could be made immediately."
New possibilities:
"Since then we have been through an exiting and profitable process, which has resulted in many sophisticated solutions.
Not only have our initial expectations of ITP been met; we got much more than we expected.
Initially we had only envisaged a 'one-to-one' replacement of all our current letter solutions processed in batches.
However, our users soon had so many options that at the same time a steady flow of new wishes appeared.
Besides making better standard documents in connection with the system we could also take into account all the possibilities of ITP when revising the routines and processes of our customer service staff.
Today we thus see a marked improvement in both customer service quality and efficiency. ITP provided our automated state of the art letter production.
Each customer service staff member now feels letter generating to be an automatic and integral part of case administration.
Besides the purely data controlled letter wordings, ITP gives in case of on-line letters (individual correspondence) the possibility of user controlled selection of wording and, if necessary, insertion of individualised optional text, all of it tailored to a specific customer.
In this process we have found marked efficiency gains and quality improvement as we are now able to make such letters in a standardised and controlled process in one operation."
Other features:
"With ITP's functionality we could immediately incorporate an automatic archiving system in direct integration with the AS/400 system. This means that we now do fully automated filing of all documents generated, and that we can always promptly retrieve and present any document from our life insurance application. Compared with previous paper files the efficiency gain, which we got for free as a premium to ITP, is substantial. By the way, our filing system is prepared for the addition of scanning documents, which activity we plan to introduce at a later date."
"The ITP concept also enabled us to integrate other valuable functionality into our solutions in a very simple way."
"For instance we send a number of documents as e-mails today rather than to print and send the documents. We started this as an in-house project to our own insurance agents, but it is indeed also possible to send documents in that way to those of our policy holders who may wish so."
"Another example of added functionality is the automated printing of bar codes on mass letters. We have a few very large amounts of letters to be sent in which the number of pages to each recipient varies. With the printed bar codes our letters can be delivered direct from the printer for machine enveloping and dispatch at an external supplier."
A development success:
"The entire concept which takes the word processing software, which people are already used to, as its starting point. This is the basis for a more dynamic co-operation between the IT department and our super users. Previously large parts of the process were considered an all-IT matter, but today super users to a very large extent create their own solutions - without passing through delaying intermediate stages. This entails shorter development processes and more efficiency in the case of both IT and users."
"And should technical questions arise, our Dutch supplier has a very well-run hot line. We have often been surprised of how prompt and competent they have been both as regards answers to concrete questions and good advice and ideas of benefit to the actual development process."
"We believe that by choosing ITP we have obtained a solution with many possibilities and huge prospects."