Case Study – Insurance
Golden Rule Insurance Company
Major Health Insurance Provider Improves Time to Market by 73%
Golden Rule Insurance Company is a major provider of health insurance for groups and individuals, life insurance, and annuities. The company pioneered medical savings accounts and has been a notable innovator in other areas. The company, which has a Standard & Poor's A+ rating, has been named to The Ward's 50 benchmark group "best of the best" list of financial companies five years in a row. Golden Rule maintains its home office in Lawrenceville, Illinois, and executive offices in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Golden Rule's health insurance group needed about a month to create a policy certificate document for new products. One reason document production took so long was that the company's custom code-driven, mainframe-based composition system could be operated by only highly trained technical specialists.
Another problem was unnecessary white space on pages. Golden Rule's policy certificates are compilations of many provisions, each of which is a block of text with its own header and footer. With their old system, if a provision ended with a line or two at the top of a page, the next provision had to start on the following page. The result was documents which were longer than they would be otherwise due to this rollover issue. The only way to close up the white space was to copy and paste the provisions, adjusting pagination manually. Performing that task took between 2-3 weeks.
Golden Rule has put composition capabilities into the hands of business users working on PCs. Like the old system, the new solution from Document Sciences takes policy and customer information from the company's administration mainframe and drives its production printers—but now, not a single typesetting specialist has to be involved in document creation and revision. The Document Sciences solution has also significantly reduced the need for programming support.
Golden Rule contract analysts now have the ability to create and edit certificate provisions in Microsoft Word, then use a graphical user interface at their PCs to specify rules that combine provisions and personalize documents for individual customers. They can preview the results, seeing the composed document onscreen, exactly as it will look when output by the mainframe printer, and even produce a sample copy on their own local printer.
Actual production of certificates for customers is performed in batch mode at very high speed. Up to 1,500 certificate packages, each consisting of 60 to 75 pages, are composed each day and routed to one of four production printers for output.
Golden Rule has begun to extend the benefits of the Document Sciences solution to other parts of its business. The company's sales service organization is applying the solution to the production of licensing contracts between Golden Rule and independent producers. Using the Document Sciences solution, corporate IT will be able to produce the contracts faster and with non-technical staff, enabling the company to redeploy programmers to other projects.