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Productivity increased by 30% thanks to the elimination of the backlog and reducing record handling times.
Who: Insurance company working daily with over 1,200 independent insurance agents and manages 160,000 contracts for 115,000 customers.
Challenge: The paper workflow was overstretched, and slowed down operations to an unacceptable level. Digitization of the business administration was quickly becoming compulsory.
Docbyte solutions: Case Management, Intelligent Mailroom
Results
- Tailored digitization increased productivity by 30%.
- The entire backlog was cleared in three departments
- Insurance agents: over 1,600 dossiers were digitally archived and all the new information was scanned and pumped into the system.
- Policy administration: the processing and management of insurance policies were reduced from five months to less than two weeks.
- Insurance claims: all claims are now fully digitalized and the entire backlog has been cleared.
- From 6 to 60 users as everybody has now access to the information.
- Significant reduction in overhead costs (OPEX): less paper, toner, and printing material. Saving on physical archival space.
Eliminating backlog and reducing record handling times at Optimco
Flemish insurance company Optimco works with over 1,200 independent insurance agents on a daily basis. It manages about 160,000 contracts for 115,000 customers, which means a lot of back and forth communication.
At Optimco, everyone is treated like a winner and friendly, personal communication is very important for both the company and its customers.
But the company's growth revealed that its paper workflow had reached its limits. So to ensure smooth growth, Marc Peeters, former CIO and CFO of Optimco, reached out to help digitize the whole process with our case management solution and our digital mailroom.
Streamlining the mailroom to handle growth
In less than five years, Optimco doubled in size – from 30 to 60 employees – to keep up with customer demand. At the time, six people were working in the administrative mailroom, classifying paperwork and allocating dossiers to different people.
Even with six people, there was still too much paperwork coming into Optimco's mailroom to handle everything properly.
A huge backlog of dossiers that required sorting was building up. At one point, measuring the backlog by the meter, up to 15 meters of dossiers still needed to be processed. Service for the insurance agents also suffered.
If they called for information on a dossier, half the time they couldn't get an answer straightaway because the dossier had to be lookup up first by the mailroom, a process that could take one or two days.
Optimco looked for a partner that could help quickly – something Docbyte would be able to do.
Eliminating backlog
Optimco reached out to Docbyte to help streamline the company's administration. Docbyte created a digital mailroom and claims management solution for three departments – insurance agents, policy administration and insurance claims – which eliminated the entire backlog and put a digital process in place for new dossiers:
- Insurance agents: over 1,600 dossiers were digitally archived and all the new information was scanned and pumped into the system.
- Policy administration: the processing and management of insurance policies was reduced from five months to less than two weeks.
- Insurance claims: all claims are now fully digitalized and the entire backlog has been cleared.
From 6 to 60 users
All sixty employees have access to the new system case management system, called Feniks.
This was beneficial for both our planning and customer service. In the old system, the weekly schedule was printed out on Monday morning. You knew what to do for the rest of the week, but there wasn't much room to revise schedules.
Now, the automatic agenda system gives you tasks as soon as something needs to be done. People have more time to help out a colleague or a client with an urgent issue.
There was also a significant reduction in overhead costs (OPEX) because the company uses less paper, toner and printing material and is saving on physical archival space thanks to the digitization.
It is also because no one needs to search through paperwork anymore. Previously, if an agent called to follow up a dossier, we either had to call them back or ask a colleague.
Now Optimco can easily find all the information, even in a colleague's files, as we have access to everyone's dossiers.
More exciting work and more productivity
By automating the complex mailroom and the claims management, Docbyte helped Optimco achieve unseen levels of efficiency. Optimco gained 30% in productivity.
And this had an impact on the employees in the mailroom. Not only did the intelligent solutions take over repetitive and boring tasks, but they also ensured the same workload could be handled with fewer people.
Where previously Optimco had struggled to handle everything with six people in the mailroom, now the company has reduced its mailroom to just three employees, who are processing work the claim handlers had to do themselves in the past.
Overall, Optimco's employees feel more valued as their work is more challenging, and instead of administration they can focus on serving customers quickly and personally.
Moving offices
One slightly unexpected benefit of the new mailroom was that Optimco could easily move offices.
The company had been planning on moving, but the large paper archive was an obstacle. After digitizing everything with the Docbyte software, Optimco was able to throw out a large portion of our archive, drastically downsizing it.
Suddenly, the company wasn't encumbered with these rows of filing cabinets, so Optimco could relocate with ease.
Becoming self-sufficient
The project teams were built around early adopters and motivators in the Optimco team, who were keen to push the project internally.
Optimco selected a project manager and department head from each of the three departments that would be given a digital mailroom. Every week they were trained in a specific part of the technology.
These six people then explained the functionalities and benefits to their colleagues and were fully involved in training and testing them.
Docbyte also taught Optimco's IT-team how to resolve software errors by themselves, so minimizing Docbyte's role as much as possible and making Optimco as independent as possible.
None of that took much effort. The entire product is easy to configure and, more importantly, learning how to use it, is a breeze. It's one of the main reasons to recommend the Docbyte solutions .
The fact that the package was tailored, from metadata to interface, partly explains its ease of use. Optimco's digital mailroom is not cluttered with unnecessary fields and the like.
This means Optimco employees don't have to wade through complicated menus and heaps of data to get to the relevant information. Moreover, it makes it all quite intuitive.
And now?
Optimco's employees now have the possibility of working from home thanks to the new solution. This is still a pilot project, but the results are promising and roll out to the entire organization is scheduled.
Moreover, the benefits that the digital mailroom delivers each day bring Optimco's dream of a full-blown AI future much closer. "There's a lot of data coming into our systems, especially when we hook it up to our ERP.
This makes data mining possible, as well as RPA and an even more thoroughly automated workflow in the future.
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