Case Study – Insurance
Jefferson Pilot
Life Insurance Provider Improves Time to Market by 75% and Production Time by 50%
Jefferson Pilot Financial Insurance Company is one of several insurance and annuity companies under the umbrella of holding company Jefferson-Pilot Corporation—one of the nation's largest shareholder-owned life insurers. The combined companies, AAA-rated by Standard and Poor's, offer products for both individual and group markets, and have combined total assets of $26 billion with more than $210 billion of life insurance in force.
For more than a decade, Jefferson Pilot derived continuing value from its non-upgraded 10 year-old document automation system, using it to produce an expanding range of insurance and annuity documents. Recently, however, the constant new product introductions and unrelenting time-to-market pressure of today's insurance industry have progressed beyond the system's capabilities.
The time-consuming development process, which required programmers to write code on a mainframe, created backlogs that often prevented documents from being developed and tested in the most efficient way—simultaneously with the new products they support. In addition, the process couldn't accommodate demand for new content types, such as color charts and graphs, in a high-quality fashion.
The IT department decided it was time to move the company's document production platform forward.
In fact, Jefferson Pilot took what the IT officer in charge calls "a quantum leap." It upgraded to a new version of Document Sciences' dynamic content publishing suite, one with a GUI-based interface that streamlines text tagging, as well as a more powerful IBM RS/6000 and high-speed printers.
Jefferson Pilot now produces quarterly statements that used to be "a month-long ordeal" in about a day. Development time for new documents has been reduced by 75%, and overall production, including printing, has dropped by 50%. A year after its installation, the new system has cleared up backlogs, enabling the majority of documents to be developed in conjunction with new products.
Working with the Document Sciences graphical interface, users are now able to work quickly because they no longer have to write job code manually. Instead, the software allows users to assign composition tags visually, and it generates the corresponding code in the background. They can click on formatted text to view and modify coding, and reuse formatting by dragging and dropping composed text, along with its code, from one document to another.
The "quantum leap" has only just begun. IT is working with a number of business areas within the company to explore additional applications, including one whose goal is to reduce the number of letter types used in customer correspondence from about 1,500 to 100. The company is also interested in using the system to provide composed documents online to agents and, ultimately, to customers.