Peer-to-Peer

Managing documents intelligently

Apollo DKV Insurance Corporation opted for EMC Documentum to centrally process all their documents, and provide access to each user. By Neeraj Gandhi

Business today is running on information. This information is being generated 24x7 in any organization today. It will not be an exaggeration to say that information has become an integral part of the engine that drives the growth of any enterprise. To put it differently, mismanagement or loss of information can spell a disaster for the enterprise and can even mean the loss of a potential business opportunity. Therefore, managing this information or data becomes crucial for an enterprise, which has to meet its business objectives.

The sources of information in an enterprise can be many. For instance, for any standard organization information is generated in the sales, marketing, accounts, HR, and the administration departments. For a typical insurance company, this information is largely paper based, and is available in proposal forms, policy detail forms and claim forms etc. These forms are then stored in files (that act as a database), and these files then move around in different departments or even branch offices for access to the information that they contain.

This process of moving these files around the departments and offices becomes a tedious and time-consuming task. Moreover, keeping a track of the documents becomes almost next to impossible. Besides, accessing documents from different branch offices means a virtual dig through the pile of documents, not to forget the additional courier cost in transferring these files. The situation could have been quite similar at Apollo DKV Insurance Corporation, a health insurance company (joint venture between Apollo Hospitals Group and DKV, a European health insurance company).

“Proposals received at point of sale outlets have to be transferred to the head office for processing and policy issuance. This has cost implications as well as increased TAT for policy issuance. Besides, it is difficult to track the status of a document at any point of time. To manage this manually one needs to maintain manual ledgers and spreadsheets, which wouldn’t give a 100% accurate result,” said C Dinesh Kumar, Senior Manager – Applications, Apollo DKV Insurance Company Limited.

To avoid being trapped into these problems, Apollo DKV decided to deploy EMC’s enterprise content management solution, Documentum. “We were looking for a proven solution which could help us overtake all the challenges. As a start up insurance company it was important for our IT processes to be efficient and compete with the market. Documentum has helped us achieve this goal,” added Kumar.

Deploying the solution

Before selecting Documentum, Apollo DKV weighed the solution on different parameters like front end and back end technology, cost, integration capability, user friendliness, performance, BPM functionalities, archival mechanism, experience in the insurance domain, compression technology, and usability as a base platform for cross functional applications.

The implementation was done in a phased manner, and the solution was deployed in two phases. The first phase started in August 2007, which involved deployment of core Documentum and its allied modules. During this stage, special care was taken in order to make the solution accessible to all branches, and to allow the users to view the image whenever and wherever they required.

Stage I: Essentially Apollo DKV had two different solutions, the core insurance application called Elixir and Documentum as a platform. The motive here was to generate a bridge between these two applications. For this purpose the company listed down different functions that were required of Documentum. Finally, it was selected for two prime functions namely Policy Generation and Claims Processing Engine.

“We needed Documentum to get the required information to our core insurance application. Since Documentum is available with all parameters and attributes like identifying document type, indexing parameters etc., it helped us in laying the foundation for proposals and claims processing,” said Kumar.

Stage II: The second stage involved the interfacing of Documentum with the core insurance application. It involved interfacing and coding of core insurance application and Documentum at the Application Program Interface (API) level. At the end of this stage, a total of nine interfacing points were created between the two applications. This stage was completed by the first week of November 2007.

Overall, the deployment was completed in four months flat, i.e. from August 2007 to November 2007.

Benefits achieved

Apollo DVK has benefited from leveraging Documentum, both from the management and the business perspective. Essentially, what the solution has done is transform the health insurance company into a paperless organization. The solution has helped in centrally processing all the proposals and claim forms and has also brought down the cost of transferring files manually.

“The solution has helped us reduce the operation cost, training cost, the cost of transferring of files manually. Also, integrating the solution with the core insurance application has helped maintain a low TAT. This has helped us concentrate more on the core process and attain great control over them. Since the documents are stored in a central repository, these can be accessed from any of the branches and point of sale outlets,” said Kumar.

The company is now looking at integrating Documentum with the CRM tool to provide faster service to customer queries.

neeraj.gandhi@expressindia.com