NAMIC Insurance Company (NAMICO) is unique in the insurance industry; it was formed by a trade association, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), to provide professional liability insurance to association members.
NAMICO, in other words, insures the insurers. The company is the largest insurer of mutual property and casualty companies in the United States, and its surplus has grown from $3.7 million in 1987 to over $26 million today. NAMICO also plays an important role within the insurance industry; its specialized underwriting and risk selection practices provide a sound foundation for market stability and affordability.
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Documents are a fundamental component of all of NAMICO’s business-critical processes, from writing quotes, to issuing policies, to adjudicating claims. It must therefore manage its document processes effectively in order to maximize operational efficiency, maintain regulatory compliance, and satisfy its clients’ needs.
Many of NAMICO’s documents must be handled in tightly prescribed ways. For example, at the completion of steps such as invoice approvals, documents need to be stamped. Often the stamps must meet precise specifications for placement, height and font.
NAMICO’s organizational structure presents additional document management challenges. NAMICO manages the IT infrastructure on behalf of another NAMIC subsidiary, NAMIC Insurance Agency (NIA). NIA serves as an agent for NAMICO policies, but it also sells insurance products underwritten by other providers. Therefore, NAMICO must be scrupulous about separating its own internal workflows from NIAs.
When NAMICO decided to implement electronic records management, it needed a solution that would allow it to establish secure walls between certain documents and workflows. “We looked at a number of options,” explains Brian Stanek, VP Information Technology, NAMICO. “Micro Focus® Content Manager met our needs from a document management perspective. It was also the only available solution that met our security requirements, because it allows us to completely isolate our two companies’ documents.”
After NAMICO purchased its Micro Focus Content Manager license, it turned to Tagence, Inc. (formerly UrsaNav Information Solutions) to implement the solution and train the company’s IT team.
Tagence’s deep expertise with information governance solutions, coupled with its strong engineering and IT foundation, ensured a smooth deployment and effective user adoption. “The Tagence consultants helped us come up to speed on the technology, and we continue to rely on Tagence for front-line support,” says Stanek.
Tagence consultants also worked with NAMICO to ensure that only authorized users would have access to particular documents. This framework enabled NAMICO to offer its fellow subsidiary, NIA, electronic records management services, while maintaining the integrity of each company’s respective workflows.
Complementing Critical Business Workflows
NAMICO, like many insurance agencies, uses a diary-based workflow tool to drive its critical business processes. Significant events, such as the expiration of a policy, trigger alerts and when NAMICO employees or systems execute tasks such as issuing renewal notices, the tool logs those events as well.
Content Manager serves as a parallel technology, enabling employees to manage the documents that are created or updated during these workflows. The Micro Focus software is integrated with NAMICO’s Microsoft Office applications to automate hand offs between the two environments. (In the future, NAMICO will also integrate its custom-built workflow tool with Content Manager as well.)
Content Manager allowed NAMICO to create an electronic filing system that reproduced the physical filing system it replaced. This made it easier for users to adopt the technology. Records are tracked using a ‘smart number’ coding system so that users can tell, by simply looking at the record number, what the document is.
In addition, Content Manager allows users to perform text searches on documents. This makes it easier for users to do things like cross-reference claims against policy records. “We’re using technology to hunt for and compile documents, instead of having to physically look for files, print them out, and assemble them,” notes Stanek.
