By Michael P. Voelker
The traditional challenge for insurers looking for a content management solution is that on one hand, it can be too costly to bring in an enterprise solution from the outset. But on the other, deploying a unit-level content management solution to address pain points today can leave companies with siloed systems and bigger problems tomorrow.
Ed McQuiston, director of insurance solutions at Hyland Software, says Hyland’s OnBase platform provides the best-of-both-worlds solution, offering insurers an enterprise-grade platform tailored to a wide range of specific insurance workflows. It can be deployed quickly at the departmental level yet is robust enough to be an enterprise system. Insurers apparently agree with McQuiston’s assessment, ranking the company highly in the Insurer’s Choice 2008 awards, tied for third place overall in life/health. Additionally, Hyland received top honors in the life/health space for its ability to help carriers optimize workflow and develop and enhance products and also was recognized for its ability to keep business operating.
Many insurers are looking to consolidate and replace legacy content management systems today, McQuiston reports. “We often work with clients who find they’ve picked a content management solution they can’t extend across the enterprise because it either can’t scale to that extent or it never was designed to be deployed in an insurance environment,” he says.
OnBase takes content from virtually any source and in a variety of formats—from Word documents and mainframe reports to e-mail—available to users across the organization from within the administration systems they are accustomed to using. With OnBase, life insurers can capture documents when and where they are received and automatically distribute work to the right staff using rules-based workflow. The system supports compliance initiatives with audit trails, document histories, and records management.
“Our solution is scaled horizontally by function yet vertically by price,” McQuiston says. “Oftentimes a smaller insurer would have to settle for a content management system targeted to one function, such as claims, simply from a price standpoint. With OnBase, it receives support for workflows across the organization—claims, underwriting, accounting, invoicing, and others—just as an insurer writing billions of dollars in premium would obtain in our platform.”
Flexible Framework
McQuiston differentiates OnBase’s flexible insurance process framework from a rigid workflow template. “Although the system is designed with a best-practice process framework developed through hundreds of installations, it does not dictate the way insurers need to do business,” he says. “Every insurer has things it does that are unique and that contribute to its competitive advantage.”
Insurers are able to custom-configure process workflows without custom scripting. “Once you’ve designed the process, the tools are point and click and drag and drop,” McQuiston explains. “Our deployment times from whiteboard to software are the shortest out there because of that ease of configuration. That rapid deployment directly relates to achieving return on investment faster and driving down total cost of ownership.”
At one of Hyland’s larger installations in the health payer space, the company was able to roll out OnBase workflows to individual departments on a process-by-process basis, encompassing 13 different departments in just 20 weeks. According to McQuiston, the insurer has seen increased efficiency with features such as instant search and retrieval, automated content-centric workflows, cross-referencing, and automatic indexing. It also has lower operational costs by reducing paper and printing expenses, integrating with existing applications, and experiencing quick user training and simpler IT administration.
In 2007, Hyland had a growth rate of more than 35 percent, fueled by existing customers finding new ways to leverage the OnBase platform as well as by new customer sales, indicates McQuiston.
“We will continue to build out insurance-specific solutions we offer, taking the framework concept and applying it to other repeatable process areas within insurance,” McQuiston adds. “We feel like the market is ripe for a company that can combine the insurance expertise you’d typically associate with a niche vendor with the enterprise scalability of a true ECM platform at a palatable price point.”
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