Case Study: Once upon a time, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance printed and scanned 15,000 pages of documents per day. But then it plugged Xenos Group's D2e document management solution into its workflow (and lived happily ever after).There are painstaking processes, and then there are really painstaking processes. Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Company's document management process fell squarely into the latter category.
Every night, it printed 15,000 pieces of paper, scanned those pages into its system, and then shredded the pages. It was a hard job, but a necessary one: Those pages were the declarations that tell a client what the policy is and what that policy covers.
"I'm not even sure how long it took to do that," said Dennis Mehmen, CIO of the Iowa-based company.
There had to be an easier way, and Xenos Group Inc. ended up having the answer: d2e.
D2e is Xenos Group Inc.'s document enhancement solution.
It enables the repurposing, archival, retrieval, printing and Web view of documents across a company or enterprise.
Grinnell, as a reinsurance company, insures the insurance companies.
In Grinnell's case, they are handling farm mutual insurance companies that generally serve customers in a one- to 10-county area.
Grinnell reinsures more than 280 farm mutuals, equaling more than 4,000 licensed independent agents in Iowa and the surrounding states.
"We are really trying to create a paperless environment," said Kevin Battreall, systems administrator for Grinnell.
"We needed to be able to generate our decs [declarations] in PDF format, not just as streaming data on our Xerox, and we wanted to be able to put it out on a secured Web site that agents could get to these and download them."
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Carla Kelling, assistant vice president for information technology, explained further: "We didn't have an easy way to print out our declarations. And there was no easy way to find one piece of information and just print out that page. You had to print out the entire declaration."
All-in-all, it was a very time-consuming chore that was eating up a lot of man hours and a lot of paper.
So how has d2e created a better workflow for Grinnell?
"We now have this all automated," said Battreall. "During our nightly processing, after we create our dec pages, we FTP these pages to an Intel box, running a VB.net that watches the directory for these files and runs the d2e Transform to create either a TIFF or PDF. It will read through the .ini file to see what I want to generate – PDF, TIFF or both."
D2e Transform is the software running on the Intel box that does the hard work. VB.net is a programming language Battreall uses to execute the d2e Transform.
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The TIFF files are imported into its Global 360 imaging system for easy archival and retrieval.
"If our building goes away, we don't lose our data because it's all backed up in our imaging system," Mehman said.
Battreall said: "The imaging system is a document storage/retrieval system for scanning in paper documents and storing them as TIFF files. This also helps so that we don't print any test reports any longer. Probably saves us another 500 to 1,000 pages per day."
All of this is strictly for internal use by those working at Grinnell and the outside agents.
Next Page: Grinnell's new automated workflow affects 75 percent of its workers and helps 10,000 agents in the field.
"Internally, part of our culture is to continue to go paperless," Battreall said. "As for the agents, the more things we put on the Web, the more they want online. They won't have to find storage in their offices for all the boxes of paper we have to now send them--they'll be grateful."
Currently, only the test declarations are online in the system, but the agents will be going paperless in the fall.
"This will continue to enhance our workflows," Mehman said. "I think it's going to speed up the service levels from an access point. Nobody will have to wait for a declaration to be rescanned in. They had to wait for it to be printed, and then wait to be scanned before it was back in system. Now it's more instant."
"Externally, with our agents, it will improve the ease of doing business for agents. They'll be able to do things more quickly and won't have to look for it on paper."
This change from paper to the d2e process of importing and creating documents has impacted, according to Mehman, about three-fourths of the 700 workers at Grinnell and, when it comes online, will help about 10,000 agents.
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Xenos also makes the GoXML product that is an integration and transaction-processing solution for structured data such as EDI, EDIFACT, AL3, X12, XLM, etc.
"The service from Xenos has been very good," Battreall said. "We're just starting to scratch the service of what we can use this [product] for. We have just a small portion of our reports it in it right now. We see ourselves really expanding the use of this as we go along."
Although the company hasn't done any ROI around implementing this solution, they all agree the real benefit is just how much easier both internal and external workflows will be.
And, somewhere, a forest is letting out a sigh of relief.
Document Management 
