Capital alliance life completes migration to Oculus archiving and document management system

Life Insurance Company Capital Alliance Life has completed migration onto an Oculus archiving and document management system as part of its ongoing quest to eliminate unwieldy and inefficient paperflows.

The company has invested over R350 000 in replacing a previous custom developed system with the Oculus alternative and has already achieved greater flexibility and capacity to take multiple companies onto the system. "We now have documentation from 20 branches archived and accessible on Oculus, plus substantial expansion capability for new business," confirms Capital Alliance executive manager: IT, Peter Spence.

"Other than the client/server based indexing process the system is doing most of what we want it to do," he adds.

"Our primary objective was to stop moving paper and make information more quickly and easily accessible using the imaging server at our customer call centre.

"This improves overall business processes and enables us to respond more quickly and knowledgeably to customer queries.

"We have now reached the stage where all documentation is scanned and archived, and all policy holder correspondence moves via imaging," he continues.

"The result is that turnaround on processing new policies has been reduced from eight and10 days, to within 48 hours, without any risk of documents being lost in the normal inter-departmental paperchase.

"The same applies to policy servicing and claims which we are now able to settle straightforward requests within just 24 hours."

Besides making Capital Alliance more efficient, more effective, and therefore more competitive, Spence says the Oculus archiving and document imaging system has also changed important business processes in that multi-skilled agents are now employed to handle any incoming queries to the company`s call centre.

"All they need to establish is a customer`s policy number and they can then access any document pertaining to that policy scanned into the system.

"This means customers can usually get an immediate response to queries, rather than being passed from one department to another as people track down all the necessary paperwork associated with different aspects of the same policy," he explains.

In the year since the migration process to Oculus began, some 94 000 policies of an average 12 pages each have been archived onto the system. The company is now in the process of adding a further 3,5million images following its takeover in June of Standard General Insurance.

"We have 200Gb of disc storage at the moment and will expand this as required," says Spence, adding: "Oculus has an efficient archiving process that supports jukebox or disc retrieval.

"Basically, our primary demand is for access, stability and quality of data, and despite some initial problems we are now achieving this" he continues.

"Oculus has been very proactive in supporting us and has enhanced their system to include the browser technology we also wanted. At the moment the indexing module is client/server based and by the end of 2000 we aim to be thin client and browser enabled.

"We are confident that this is where Oculus will take us," he concludes.