Skandia halves costs and multiplies productivity with InputAccel

How an effective data capture strategy at insurance company Skandia delivered customer service improvements and reduced costs

Steve Groom, Business Development Director, Captiva Software

The Challenge: reduce operational costs by 25 per cent
Andrew Hyland, a business support manager in Stockholm with, Sweden-based Skandia, a multinational insurance company, was tasked with recommending improvements to the way the company captured information from paper documents used to conduct business with its independent financial advisors (IFAs) and direct customers. The requested changes were part of Picture 2002, a comprehensive, company-wide review of Skandia’s goals, strategy and organisational efficiency. One of the central objectives of the initiative was to define an operational structure that would deliver the maximum benefit to customers while simultaneously reducing costs by 25 per cent.

At the onset of Picture 2002, Skandia ran two scanning operations employing 48 employees and 25 scanners. Yet the company as a whole viewed the operation purely as archival in nature—an operational issue with little bearing on the core business.

“These scanned documents included already-processed policy applications and routine correspondence. But our employees still needed to retrieve them from time to time. Only documents that had been scanned could be retrieved easily. Anything else had to be dug out manually from a mountain of paper,” Hyland said at the project initiation. “What I found was a disorganised unit with backlogs of work piling up and no clearly defined process flow.”

Skandia was also set to introduce an improved workflow which was identified as a key enabler for overall change and thus had a major impact on the role of the scanning operation. Newly-received documents such as applications, policy renewals and redemption forms would now also enter the workflow system via the scanning operation. Many documents would now need to be captured as a matter of urgency. Any document defined as ‘sensitive to funds’, such as those involving the movement of money, had to be captured before 9.00am and processed by 11.00am. If fund managers were forced to work without the latest financial information, there was the potential for significant financial exposure to Skandia.

A less dramatic but still serious threat to Skandia’s competitiveness was posed by high operating costs, measured in both salaries and scanner maintenance costs. However, the scanning process did play a vital role in supporting the customer service teams.

“If one of the ten service teams can’t function, the others can keep going, but if the scanning operation breaks down, there is no workflow and customer service suffers,” Hyland continued. “Without going through this technology initiative, we would not have in place an effective scanning process able to deliver work in a timely fashion to customer service. Put simply, that means they would fail in their mission to deliver customer service.”

The Solution: InputAccel
Captiva Software Corporation (formerly ActionPoint), was one of several companies invited to bid on the information capture software element of the overall system. Captiva’s professional services group (PSG) and InputAccel, Captiva’s premier information capture software solution, were the only supplier and product combination able to meet Skandia’s stringent business requirement at the right price.
“It was particularly important that capture could be easily integrated with our other systems,” said Hyland. “Captiva was able to assure us that the InputAccel platform could support the functionality we would need in the future and that their PSG could facilitate the integration process.” Kodak scanners were also selected as part of the new capture solution.

The organisational plan dictated that new business should be added to the workflow stream before the end of the tax year in April of 2000. Meeting that deadline became critically important, as business volumes rose by 80 per cent that year and there were 12,000 applications for ISAs alone in a single day. To meet the government’s compliance rules for these products, all applications had to be processed by 11am on the day of application.

Results: 5x increase in productivity, costs slashed by half
Upon implementation of the new solution, scanned page levels jumped from about 1,000 pages per scanner per day to between 8,000 and10,000 pages per scanner per day. The volume of overall documents received and processed also soared. The original archiving operation managed around 30,000 documents a week. The number of documents destined both for workflow and the archival system rose to 130,000-150,000 per week.

“If we had changed nothing in the face of this increasing volume of documents, we would have needed to employ 120 people in the scanning operation to handle the load,” Hyland estimated. “We have removed a potentially critical bottleneck from the business. Without an efficient scanning operation, we would be unable to process applications fast enough, we couldn’t write the business and we would end up damaging our relationship with the IFAs.”

Today, twenty-eight employees and four high-volume scanners manage a workload that has increased exponentially since the project started. Thanks to Captiva and InputAccel, the revamped scanning operation met the corporate objectives set for it under the change initiative. Productivity was substantially improved while unit costs were cut in half.

Latest from Skandia
The latest news from Skandia, announced in February, is its agreement with Royal & Sun Alliance to acquire Dublin-based Royal & SunAlliance Eurolife Limited (Eurolife) and its plans to further develop its cross-border business into key European markets.

The Skandia UK Group already has extensive experience in offshore and cross-border operations. Royal Skandia, its Isle of Man-based offshore arm, is a leading player in the off-shore life market. Targeting international investors around the world, it now has close to twenty years’ experience and £3 billion funds under management. The UK Group also carries out cross-border activities in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany. The Group is a key player in these markets and it has grown to become the leading unit-linked player in the Finnish voluntary pension market.

The acquisition of Eurolife, a subsidiary of the Royal & Sun Alliance Group, is for an undisclosed sum. The move accelerates Skandia’s plans to build European business, using its proven expertise in cross-border operations.

Captiva Software, Hanover House, Cross Lane, Guildford, Surrey GU1 1UG. Tel: 01483 460500; fax: 01483 460600; www.captivasoftware.com; e-mail: sgroom@captivasoftware.com . Contact: Steve Groom.

Skandia Head Office, PO Box 37, Skandia House, Portland Terrace, Southampton SO14 7AY. Phone: 023 8033 4411; www.skandia.co.uk