Document Systems Yield High ROI

For document management systems vendors the “number one competitor” is this idea: “Lets hire 25 more people to handle the work,” notes John Sarich, insurance industry marketing manager for FileNET Corp., of Costa Mesa, Calif. (www.filenet.com).

“Our second main competitor is Lets build it ourselves, ” he continues.

Sarich says more than a third of FileNETs revenues annually derive from the insurance industry. “Were in 80 of the top 100 insurance companies in the United States.

“We have technology thatcan take an e-mail, read it, figure out by context sensitivity or content sensitivitywhat it is about anddetermine where its going in the workflow,” Sarich says.

FileNETs latest such product is Panagon Content Services. The current release, 5.2, is software for creating, accessing, managing and securing business-critical content, says FileNET.

Version 5.2 offers enhanced deployment, enabling customers “to solve their enterprise content management needs while using their existing network infrastructure and software,” FileNET says.

Version 5.2 runs in the Windows 2000 “cluster environment,” the company notes.

With its Web-based system administration tools, Panagon can be managed from any Internet-enabled workstation, allowing remote administrative staff to perform tasks such as adding and maintaining users and groups, storage categories and customer properties, FileNET says.

Sarich says the cost of the FileNET document management products varies according to the size of the organization, how many licenses are bought, and how big a system is needed.

But “the typical installation in a $1 billion plus p-c company[is] between $3 million to $5 million,” he states.

As for return on investment, Sarich says he likes to tell prospects “that the technology you get from us is basically free,” due to the reduced costs, increased efficiencies and improved customer services.

To provide document management products, Computer Sciences Corp., El Segundo, Calif. (www.csc.com) partners with other vendors, says Joanna Creamer, senior vice president.

One such partner, DST Systems of Kansas City, Mo., developed a process management product for the mutual fund market that CSC now exclusively resells to the insurance market under the name Automated Work Distributor.

AWD is aimed primarily at medium to large carriers, Creamer says. It tracks applications and other information that come into an insurance organization and distributes all of the work electronically throughout the organization “based on a set of predefined process flows, service standards, priority levels and skill sets of the workforce,” she explains.

Additionally, AWD has a built-in quality component that helps managers monitor the specific types of errors being made. “You can then spot train if you see too many [employees] making the same kind of error,” Creamer points out. The system also can alert a manager when service levels are not being met.

The latest version of AWD, release 3.0, features faster data recall, greater processing control, a browser-based interface and support for more computing platforms, says CSC.

Creamer says AWD runs on various platforms such as NT, AS/400 and Sun Polaris. “We also have a mainframe version that is ready for a beta customer,” she reported.

She says the 40 or 50 companies tracked by CSC since first installing AWD saw “productivity increases of between 25% and 35%” and cost savings of 20% to 30%. By applying the product to other business areas, they saw productivity improvements in the 50% range, she states.

The ROI, Creamer says, is usually within 24 months. She says one reason for this is AWDs “out of the box functionality,” meaning it can be installed without the need to write code.

Pricing information was not provided.