Penn National Insurance has slashed the time it takes underwriters to produce both batch and real-time documents for agents and policyholders by linking its Allenbrook Phoenix policy administration system to Exstream Software’s Dialogue enterprise personalization software for printing and archiving.

When Penn National underwriters used the print service within Phoenix to produce documents, their desktop computers were tied up for several minutes while the document was printing; when they use Dialogue, the feed takes a second or two from their desktop systems and then they can go back to work while the document is produced. And while Phoenix took much longer to produce a policy for 100 cars than for one car, the number of vehicles in a policy doesn’t lengthen the time it takes to produce a document with Dialogue.

“Once underwriters had Dialogue running in batch mode overnight, the next phase was to do real-time document production,” said Tim Caskey, senior systems analyst at the carrier. He turned to Steve Wenck, an IT consultant, for assistance with configuring the system so production jobs wouldn’t conflict with each other on the way to the company’s imaging system.

Wenck used Microsoft’s MSMQ to set up six separate queues that control the printing with Visual Basic .NET code. This real-time configuration used Dialogue to create a TIFF image for the Penn National archives, eliminating the need to scan the printed policy for image creation.

Penn National stores its policy information in a Microsoft SQL Server database. From there a flat file is created and sent to Dialogue, providing a more efficient procedure with large files than using an ODBC connection, although ODBC works well for small projects such as a single page announcement.

“That’s another thing great about Exstream’s product,” said Caskey. “We can quickly generate correspondence to all our agents or insureds just by composing the text and then merging data elements from a SQL database. Dialogue has also proven to be much easier for formatting documents than Phoenix, where page breaks and margins proved to be a challenge.”

The mid-Atlantic carrier is so impressed with the speed of Dialogue – and its cost reductions – that it is looking at every department that creates documents to see if it makes sense to move them to the Dialogue platform.

“Phoenix contains all the data, but Dialogue is a much more robust document creation solution,” added Caskey.

The carrier is planning to expand its use of Exstream’s Dialogue to produce Explanation of Benefits letters along with the benefit check in one print stream. Today the explanations and checks are produced by separate systems and then have to be combined manually for mailing. Policies also now require manually combining documents from two different systems. Caskey hopes to send the output from the two systems into a feed to Dialogue.

“At that point when we can stop the manual creation of insurance policies going out the door, we will have a savings in time that we can measure,” he said.

Penn National’s initial deployment of Dialogue took just six weeks, and it has been running for more than nine months with no problems, he added.

“The time efficiency is important for us,” explained Caskey. “The bulk of our commercial business is from small businesses, and the key to doing that profitably is to minimize the amount of human intervention in touching those policies. You need to automate as much as possible and take as much of the clerical burden off your underwriters and support people as possible.”

Dialogue’s automatic generation and indexing of images for the archive without human intervention meets that need.

“No one has to touch it, and the worksheets go into the files with the policy. Then we can let our agents see the documents through our Web site, and offer them a PDF of the worksheet. Getting information out to our agents faster and better is another big win for us,” he said.

Another reason for the fast rollout is that the IT staff at Penn National works closely with the business users. The company has been named one of the top 100 places to work in IT for several years running.

“Our IT staff connects with its business customers so they understand each other’s roles,” added Caskey. “In addition, our staff is involved in the selection of vendors and software, so we don’t get stuck with a vendor selection made at the top of the company.”

www.allenbrook.com
www.pennnationalinsurance.com
www.exstream.com