Zurich Financial Services, the $56bn global insurance
firm, now knows exactly how much it will pay to process each of the
400,000 documents a day it receives for the next 10
years.
This is the result of an
innovative deal it has struck with Swiss Post. For a
volume-dependent unit cost fixed for the next decade, Swiss Post
will carry, capture, digitise and archive Zurich's incoming and
outgoing post and international intra-company mail.
All correspondence are scanned on scanners and all-in-one
scanner/printer/fax devices. Using Kofax’s document capture and
document exchange software to capture the content, they
automatically transfer the digital data to an IBM FileNet
workflow and archiving application.
The aim is to stop handling paper as soon as possible, said
Brian Cosgrove, Zurich's pan-European programming manager and the
executive responsible for the project. This is because digital
files are cheaper, easier and more flexible to handle, and easier
to retrieve.
This should lead to greater efficiency and better productivity.
A document destruction schedule, which ensures that paperwork is
kept no longer than regulations require, is a key part of the
scheme.
The deal came from tough haggling, said Cosgrove, who negotiated
the deal with Swiss Post's services director Charles
Parrington-Tyler.
It covers Zurich's General, Life and Corporate business units.
The scheme kicks off in the UK and Switzerland this quarter.
Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria will follow later. More
countries, including its Zurich's US subsidiary, Farmers Insurance,
will join, depending on their business volumes and maturity of
their IT systems, said Cosgrove.
Cosgrove declined to give details of the value of the deal. "The
company has said it aims to reduce its operating costs by 20%," he
said. "I can say that my financial director was very pleased with
the cost benefit analysis."
The benefits were all "hard-costed", ie. financial, Cosgrove
said, but the crucial driver was to improve the consistency of the
customer experience in dealing with Zurich worldwide. This
consistency is an advantage in the ruthlessly competitive financial
services market, he said. "Five minutes saved looking for a paper
file is five minutes more you can spend talking to your customer,"
he said.
Swiss Post will use its existing network of national
datacentres, which use
virtualised HP servers running VMware to drive Kofax scanners.
Parrington-Tyler said, "We then process information from the
documents so that we can integrate the extracted information and
carry out additional processing, such as the application of
business rules around the data."
The digitised data is then sent via secure links to a central
Filenet server run by Zurich's IT department, where it is stored
before being sent to the appropriate national office for use with
internal business applications. Part of the data set identifies the
target system or repository as well as any requirement to transform
the images to other document formats.
The process is independent of the target system and enables the
delivery of documents and data to any system, including the
multiple
Filenet repositories that Zurich uses. Once in a Filenet
electronic document repository, Zurich staff can access them using
their standard business applications, such as policy take-on and
renewal and claims processing.