Exeter Friendly Society

Introduction

Exeter Friendly Society invested in a new document capture, content management and workflow system in 2002. The ultimate aim of the system is to maintain and improve the business processes concerned with its already highly regarded service to Exeter Friendly's 55,000 members.

This case study details the process The Society went through to find and implement a suitable company-wide system, together with the lessons learnt and its future plans with regard to document management, workflow and eBusiness.

Background

Exeter Friendly Society has been a specialist in private healthcare since 1927. With no shareholders, all surplus funds are utilised to improve benefits for its members. The Society aims to offer realistic subscriptions in return for excellent benefits and customer service. The Society is ISO 9001 registered and an 'Investor in People', with 70 staff based at its West Country headquarters.

As a friendly society, Exeter Friendly has to adhere to strict rules regarding its operations, and exists for its members. The IT department is consequently committed to developing and installing systems to support this central ethos.

Mark Moreland, Head of IT, explains that The Society had been running a document management system for a number of years, through which all incoming correspondence was scanned, stored in a central repository and used for searching and annotation facilities. The system aided the processing and assessment of claims and enquiries. Moreland comments, "Our existing system was reaching the end of its life and had limited scope for expansion. This gave us the impetus to search for a replacement system which offered the scope, flexibility and reliability we required".

Moreland stresses that the flexiblility of the new system was of paramount importance to The Society. "We needed the same functionality afforded by our former system, with the added benefits that it could integrate with our CRM/claims administration system, offer scope for wide-scale expansion, and could also accommodate future workflow and eBusiness requirements".

Speed and ease of scanning, image quality and the accuracy of the indexing information captured are all cited as business critical factors. As an example, if there is an error during indexing, this could result in a claim being settled to the wrong member.

Aims & Objectives

The Society's criteria for a new system included:

· To replace its existing system with a modern, supportable package that would provide reliable operation on its existing infrastructure - both on time (by the end of December 2002) and with minimal disruption
· Seamless transition, including migration of proprietary data
· To enable the management of electronic documentation created during the customer services process from within its established CRM/claims administration system
· To automatically import and store bulk customer correspondence created by the CRM system, and enable auto-indexing using pre-defined rules, MS Word fields, filename and so on
· Provide the potential to carry out a wide range of workflows, from the most simple ad-hoc workflow through to fully comprehensive production workflow solutions
· Possible scope for the addition of eBusiness capabilities (e.g. Web interaction).

The Solution

The Society assessed a number of alternative solutions from suppliers including Documentum, Hyland Software, and Open Connections, a FileNet ValueNET Partner. Open Connections' solution was chosen for company-wide implementation as a result of a tender process in November 2002. Mark Moreland comments, "Open Connections consistently proved its skills in the FileNet product set. The combination of the software supplier and its partner offered us the ideal option for building such an important relationship".

The solution provided by Open Connections included 40 concurrent licences for FileNet Panagon Content Services, eProcess Workflow and eForms software, 4 scanning workstations with Kofax Ascent and Kodak I260 scanners, Ascent Capture and Neurascript for data capture and recognition software. Open Connections also provided consultancy and implementation services, investigating The Society's system and working with Exeter's project team to address any technical issues, aid in the design of the new system and its integration with the CRM/claims administration system, and migrate the legacy system to Panagon. Richard Rogers, Open Connections' Technical Director, comments, "Open Connections has extensive experience in migrating legacy systems to Panagon, and we were able to extract all of Exeter Friendly Society's existing data with ease, including annotations".

Mark Moreland adds, "Open Connections has a broad range of skills available in its technical support teams. The knowledge demonstrated whilst implementing the solution has been second to none, the technicians being a credit to their company".

Implementation

The overriding aim of the first phase of the project was to migrate over half a million files to the Panagon system, so that the Society had a direct replacement for its existing system before the end of 2002. This phase was completed on time, and due to the sheer scale of migration, it ran for several days. Users were actively using the system straightaway, and new documents are now captured directly into the Panagon system. The first stage of workflow implementation has also been completed, including user training.

The Society's IT staff undertook most of the integration work to enable the new system to work within their CRM/claims administration system, and attended several training courses including tailored training sessions with Open Connections, and FileNet and Neurascript standard courses. Richard Rogers comments, "The Society's approach was to say to us 'teach us what you know', so my team was happy to act as guide and facilitator throughout".

Benefits

Two of the Society's employees use the data capture system for scanning and indexing purposes. Electronic data validation is now incorporated, and indexing is more structured, and therefore more accurate. Image quality is also improved.

Claims and administration staff no longer have to use two systems for all their information needs, because the new system is so tightly integrated with the Society's CRM/claims administration system. All correspondence is stored centrally in the Panagon repository, to enable ready information access from within the established company-wide system and aid the assessment and processing of claims and enquiries. The initial implementation of workflow software will facilitate the dispatch of work evenly across a team.

Future Plans

Full production level workflow capability through FileNet eProcess software implementation is planned, together with the instalment of Neurascript software for the refinement and acceleration of the scanning process. The Society is also considering the benefits of eBusiness to its members.

Mark Moreland comments, "Open Connections' solution was delivered within our specified timescale. It provides a robust and supported platform, with the flexibility and scope for both expansion and integration - promising us ever-increasing efficiency gains in the future".

(Since the original publication of this item FileNet is now part of IBM's Enterprise Content Management Division)