Brokerage Embraces Electronic Document Management for ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Financial services

Customer Profile

Itasca, Illinois–based Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. is a leading insurance brokerage and risk management services company with more than 8,000 employees doing business in more than 100 countries.

Business Situation

Relying on paper and disparate systems for document management was inefficient and would not support the organization’s new initiatives requiring collaboration across different work locations.

Solution

The company’s Risk Management Services Division is working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner PointBridge to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 for document management.

Benefits

■ Increased process efficiencies

■ Enhanced knowledge sharing

■ Improved customer service

■ Improved records management

| | |“We were far more comfortable with our ability to cost-effectively customize SharePoint Server 2007, without having to pay for the special resources that would have been required with a different system.”

Todd Kimble, Chief Information Officer, Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Division

| |

| | | |Without a standardized document management system, Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services |

| | | |(AJGRMS)—a division of Illinois-based Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.—relied on paper and disparate systems|

| | | |when it came to storing quotes, policies, and other documents. This reliance increased the time |

| | | |required to access important documents and the difficulty for individuals to collaborate on them. |

| | | |When AJGRMS decided to move to a service center model, it became essential to migrate documents to a |

| | | |centralized electronic system so they could be routed among different locations and tracked. Working |

| | | |with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner PointBridge, AJGRMS deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint® |

| | | |Server 2007 to support the service center initiative, gain companywide efficiencies, enhance customer|

| | | |service, and improve records management of its important client documents. |

| | | | |

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| | | | |

Situation

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. is one of the world’s largest insurance brokerages and risk management services companies. It offers a full range of property/casualty products and services to customers of all sizes. The company is also one of the world’s premier alternative risk-transfer and third-party claims managers, providing full-service employee benefits consulting.

Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. operates through four primary divisions: Risk Management Services (AJGRMS), Gallagher Bassett, Gallagher Benefits Services, and Specialty Marketing and International. AJGRMS, with approximately 3,000 employees and more than 50 offices, is the company’s largest division. The division is heavily dependent on its documents; critical information concerning customers, markets, and programs is captured both in formal documents, such as proposals, quotes, and policies, and in informal documents, such as e-mail messages and other correspondence.

AJGRMS alone generates an estimated

11 million of these documents annually. Currently, the division distributes the documents throughout its 50+ offices, which are primarily located in the United States. With document volumes expected to keep pace with the company’s overall business growth of 10 percent annually, AJGRMS is likely to have as many as 180 million documents—totaling approximately 1.4 billion pages—by 2015.

Gallagher recognized that the company needed to standardize and improve the document management methods employed by the highly decentralized, autonomous AJGRMS branch offices. Some branches used software packages that were part of one of the division’s four agency-management systems, and some used third-party add-on solutions. “Because we had multiple, disparate systems in use, the default was to print everything, including all e-mail correspondence, and put it into a file folder,” says Todd Kimble, Chief Information Officer for Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Division. “The result was an awful lot of paper that was cumbersome to work with and expensive to store.”

Internal Inefficiencies

The AJGRMS Division’s operational efficiency suffered from all the time spent printing, filing, finding, and retrieving documents. Working with paper instead of electronic documents meant that only one person at a time could have access to a document, and finding information in documents required individuals to physically flip through the pages in a printout rather than executing an electronic search. This manual process increased the time necessary to locate information and respond to client requests and inquiries.

Each office kept its active documents onsite in file cabinets, and older files were moved to offsite storage locations and retained for a total of 7 to 10 years to meet records retention requirements. Says Doug Frost, Director of Business Applications for Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Division, “We had trained insurance professionals who said they spent up to 50 percent of their time managing paper files. There was a clear need to free them from the administrative burden to better leverage their skills for our clients.”

Documents that were stored electronically had their own limitations. Each office had its own repository for electronic documents, and it was difficult or impractical to share those documents with other offices and locations within the division. Without the versioning and check-in/check-out capabilities of a centralized document management system, documents needing approval or review by multiple individuals were routed manually or through e-mail, with no version controls.

New Initiatives

Two new initiatives drove the immediate need for improved document management. The first was a focused effort on process improvement companywide. This effort involved both streamlining processes within branch offices and utilizing a service center model to allow branch personnel to focus on client-facing, value-added tasks rather than administrative work.

The second initiative was a focus on division-wide niche practice groups that provide value-added products and services that are specific to industries or business segments. Members of these practice groups sit in branch offices to provide a local presence to their customers but need to collaborate and share documents with practice group members in other offices.

Both of these initiatives require that documents be available online in real time from any location, and the AJGRMS IT group saw an opportunity to support the initiatives with more advanced technology tools. “We knew that there were alternatives out there to help us with document management workflow, which is critical for identifying and alerting people to tasks, especially as we move to our new service center model,” says Kimble. “We needed a way to facilitate that communication to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.”

Solution

The AJGRMS IT group investigated a number of document management systems and conducted an in-depth, side-by-side evaluation of IBM, FileNet, Hummingbird, EMC Documentum, and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We chose Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 because it integrates more tightly with our environment and with other Web-based applications and portals than other systems. This has been proven out over the course of the project as we’ve successfully integrated document management functionality with document imaging, our agency management systems, e-mail, and other Microsoft Office programs,” says Kimble. “We were far more comfortable with our ability to cost-effectively customize SharePoint Server 2007, without having to pay for the special resources that would have been required with a different system.”

Gallagher chose to work with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner PointBridge to develop its customized document management solution. Recalls Frost, “PointBridge really understood our business requirements, devising effective solutions to resolve issues and contributing deep expertise of past SharePoint releases as well as SharePoint Server 2007, which allowed us to tailor the solution to do exactly what we wanted it to do.”

Adds Kimble, “This was a challenging project in that we were doing the development on a prerelease version of SharePoint Server 2007, but the clear, pragmatic approach used by PointBridge helped give us the confidence to move forward and implement the solution. As a partner, PointBridge does a great job of identifying risks up front, mitigating those risks, and maintaining project momentum.”

Gallagher has implemented the solution in one branch office and will roll it out to other offices over the course of 2007. Says Kimble, “If we’re successful, the other divisions at Gallagher may use SharePoint Server 2007 to meet their own document management and collaboration needs.”

Benefits

For Arthur J. Gallagher, implementing an electronic document management solution is a key step on the path to a more agile organization that can take advantage of opportunities for greater efficiency. “With the combination of refined processes and SharePoint Server 2007, our insurance professionals will spend less time on administrative activities and more time providing value-added insurance services to our clients,” says Kimble.

Increased Process Efficiencies

The new solution will help Gallagher standardize key processes and decrease the time spent managing document creation, approval, revision, storage, and retrieval. The tight integration between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and other Microsoft Office programs contributes to the company’s heightened productivity. Says Kimble, “Seamless integration makes it possible for us to kick off and monitor workflows directly from SharePoint Server 2007. Most of our employees spend the majority of their time working not in the agency management systems, but in the Microsoft Office suite. To find and work on documents, users won’t have to bounce from application to application like they would with a Documentum system.”

Thanks to the intuitive search, version-control, and repository features in Office SharePoint Server 2007, Gallagher can decrease filing and search times associated with paper documents and other unstructured content, as well as the time needed to copy and distribute documents that need to go to multiple people and groups. The solution also will establish streamlined workflows that use triggers, alarms, and escalations to minimize the time necessary to create or edit a document that requires multiple approvals or review cycles.

The combined process and technology improvements will help Gallagher serve more customers without adding staff.

Enhanced Knowledge Sharing for Improved Customer Service

Gallagher looks to the new document management system to improve its customer service representatives’ ability to respond to customer requests because representatives will have immediate access to complete documentation from one place. “Sharing pertinent information across our dispersed offices will give us a better-informed, more capable workforce,” says Frost. “With all insurance documents, notes, and customer correspondence at our fingertips, we’ll be able to deliver higher-quality service to our customers and carriers alike.”

AJGRMS also will be using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to share best practices and give the division’s employees access to the best thinking across the company, which will help it develop more targeted, sophisticated solutions that better meet the needs of its clients. Frost says, “Our niche practice group members are often in different locations and time zones, whether in the office, at home, or on the road, yet they still need to collaborate on the best solutions for our customers. We’re giving them the ability to do so with only a Web browser and a network connection.”

Improved Records Management

AJGRMS requires reliable records management, both to meet records retention policies and to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. The organization’s SharePoint Server 2007 solution includes redundant backups of electronic documents at different locations and hierarchical storage management for moving documents to less-expensive storage as they age and are accessed less frequently. “Records management used to mean physically moving paper from file cabinets to office file rooms, then to offsite storage. Retrieval of a single offsite file meant recalling the entire box in which it was stored. With SharePoint Server 2007, records management is all handled electronically,” says Frost. “We associate an electronic retention policy with each document type, and the system handles it from there.”

Because records retention is no longer subject to manual processes, not only will documents be retained long enough, but also AJGRMS will not incur additional cost by retaining documents longer than necessary. Further, unlike the current offsite paper storage/retrieval scenario, offline documents can be located through online searches and retrieved at an individual document level.

Gallagher views the implementation as a worthwhile effort with long-term rewards. “The benefits of the SharePoint Server 2007 solution were obvious,” concludes Kimble. “We chose it as our first divisionwide system because it serves as such a good foundation for our future IT needs.”

Microsoft Office System

The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:

office

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 |Hardware

■ HP ProLiant DL380 and DL580 server computers

Partner

■ PointBridge | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2007 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about PointBridge products and services, call (312) 334-1900, or visit the Web site at:

For more information about Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. products and services, call (630) 773-3800, or visit the Web site at:

“Sharing pertinent information across

our dispersed offices

will give us a better-informed, more capable workforce.”

Doug Frost, Director, Business Applications, Arthur J. Gallagher Brokerage Services Retail Division

| |

“The benefits of the SharePoint Server 2007 solution were obvious. We chose it as our first divisionwide system because it serves as such a good foundation for our future IT needs.”

Todd Kimble, Chief Information Officer,

Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Division

| |

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