Case Study – Life Insurance
Northwestern Mutual Life
Leading Life Insurance Provider Projects 25% Savings in Contract Developments
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NML) specializes in individual insurance coverage for more than three million policy holders. The company leads all U.S. competitors in this category, while also standing as a diversified resource for permanent and term life insurance, disability income, annuities, mutual funds and retirement products. NML operates through a nationwide network of 7,500 agents and has annual revenues of $13 billion.
Northwestern Mutual Life's Customer Service department works almost exclusively with contracts for individuals. As with any insurance company, the contract or policy represents the "product" to the customer. At NML, the original text for contracts was written in the Actuarial department on a word processor and re-entered by a second department for production into other electronic files using Document Sciences' dynamic content publishing suite. The contracts were then produced on a mainframe, containing text and copymarks for each page. Finally, all contracts had to be proofread.
State regulations required that contracts submitted for state approval be the same contract to the insured. This meant that contracts printed from the PC and the mainframe had to be identical in content and appearance. The only way for NML to proof the documents in its existing system was by printing each individual page. Since the minimum print turnaround time was a half day, they could not make more than two daily changes to the documents. Additionally, changes on early pages of a contract would often require subsequent pages to be repaginated, redesigned and proofread all over again.
Northwestern Mutual Life was already using Document Sciences' software to produce customized contracts. However, NML had only implemented the solution on an isolated, "island of information" basis. In early 1995, NML introduced additional components of the Document Sciences' solution to its environment. This implementation allowed NML to break the "island of information" barrier through enterprise-wide dynamic content publishing.
The solution includes a powerful and flexible document composition engine that composes variable, personalized business documents. It also includes a software application for the creation, revision, compliance management and assembly of document components used in contract and policy applications. The combined use and resulting impact of Document Sciences' solution proved to be important. NML was immediately able to view contracts on-screen, and quickly print from local printers for proofreading. Documents printed via the mainframe were virtually identical to those output on the PC.