Case Study – Insurance
Virginia Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance
On Demand Document Production Accelerates Response Time by 200%
Virginia Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (VFBMIC) is a major insurance provider headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, with 104 offices in 88 counties throughout the state. The company offers a variety of insurance lines, including property and casualty, automobile, farm, homeowners, life and annuity products.
Through early 2002, Virginia Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (VFBMIC) still generated its quotations, response letters to customer inquiries and insurance applications entirely by hand. Agents created customer correspondence and insurance forms manually, attaching handwritten notes to keep records of document customization.
The company sought a solution that would give it the flexibility and responsiveness to meet the demands of its rapidly growing customer base. With over 100 branches across the state, VFBMIC needed a way to standardize and enrich its business content across its entire organization without creating a debilitating strain on resources, workflow efficiency, or existing hardware. And its documents had to contain a high level of consistency, personalization, and accuracy, an especially important objective in maintaining hundreds of regulated forms and adhering to compliance deadlines.
Finally, VFBMIC needed a solution that would interface with its existing Simple Object Access Protocol (or SOAP) XML standard. Without such interactivity, the company would face either extensive delays in trying to integrate the new solution with its existing systems, or the need for a complete restructuring of its enterprise information systems — options that each posed considerable expense in time, money, and potential risk.
After failed attempts to integrate a competitive solution within a MV/VSE mainframe environment, VFBMIC chose Document Sciences' award-winning xPression® suite in late 2002. Working with Document Sciences and its partner, Edgewater Technology, VFBMIC successfully implemented a dynamic content publishing solution into its second-largest line of business.
xPression's J2EE architecture and comprehensive XML fluency made it a perfect fit for VFBMIC's existing SOAP standard software. As a Web Services-based, open architecture solution, xPression interfaces seamlessly with VFBMIC's existing hardware and software instead of replacing it; as a result, the company was able to save time and money during installation and setup, focusing on system refinement instead of replacement and reconfiguration.
The company expects the new system to handily hurdle the turnaround time obstacles it used to face. xPression will give VFBMIC's sales representatives a way to enter, retrieve, and use their customer information more effectively, and will provide VFBMIC document designers with powerful, flexible capabilities for document enhancement through its industry standard Microsoft® Word design tool. Field representatives currently use the system to generate on-demand responses to customer inquiries, and even though such documents represent only the first small part of VFBMIC's overall plans, there has been an undeniable positive impact on how the company responds to its customers.