Nationwide Insurance Document Processing

Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world, with more than $148 billion in assets. Nationwide provides a full range of products and financial services that include auto, fire, life, health and commercial insurance; administrative services, annuities, mutual funds and retirement plans. To manage the paperwork associated with hundreds of thousands of policies, Nationwide established a shared services division in Columbus, Ohio, called Nationwide Services, to streamline capture and document management for the entire organization.

As a longtime FileNet customer, Nationwide needed an efficient way to capture an index millions of commercial insurance documents for storage and retrieval by FileNet Image Services. The organization had a vision of a paperless environment for its commercial lines of business, replacing the cumbersome process of tracking down and retrieving paper folders to support customer inquiries. The commercial active policies generate thousands of pages and the capture system needed to be robust and able to rapidly process more than 14.5 million documents.

OCR/ICR for FileNet Capture

Called "E-file," the solution integrates FileNet Capture and Datacap Components, Datacap's forms processing software that runs inside FileNet Capture. Implemented in 2004, it succeeded in meeting all the requirements. In fact, Nationwide's "E-file" solution won a 2004 FileNet Innovation Award.

The Challenge

The goal of E-File is to provide Nationwide's six Eastern commercial service centers across the country with instant access to commerical policy documents. Previously, if any of Nationwide's commercial associates needed a policy document, they would request it from the document archive. A document tracking system would locate the physical policy file, after which it would be hand-carried to the requesting associate. It could take days to track down and retrieve a file, and if someone else had the file, retrieval would be delayed even further.

To create instant access, Nationwide needed a way to efficiently create electronic versions of all documents, both existing files and new ones that arrive daily. Once indexed and stored in the FileNet repository, key documents could be accessed immediately - even if there were multiple requests for the same document.

The Solution

The technology behind "E-File", which automates the scanning and indexing of commercial policies, is a custom integration of FileNet Capture Professional and Datacap Components. Datacap Components are a family of forms processing functions designed to install and operate inside FileNet Capture, and run within a Capture Path. Due to the compatible architectures of Datacap and FileNet, Datacap Components can be used to extend the capabilities of FileNet Capture to incorporate production forms processing and high volume image indexing.

Ayo Falokun of Nationwide Insurance reports that the Datacap system resulted in the largest productivity improvement in 20 years.

In the Nationwide application, FileNet Capture provides the scanning, batch assembly, and image clean-up, while Datacap Components delivers form identification, print, checkbox and barcode recognition, automated validations, and a user-friendly verification screen. Finally, as document images reach the end of the Capture Path, Capture commits data and indexes to the FileNet Image Library.

The forms processing capabilities that Datacap Components add to FileNet Capture enable Nationwide to automate indexing using "smart" separator sheets. All documents in a policy are preceded by a batch separator sheet, with patch code, barcode, machine print and handwritten data, which automatically identifies the policy number, date, and other "meta data" to be associated with every document that follows.

Then, each individual document is preceded by a document separator sheet, which features a list of document types (such as Policy, Certificate of Insurance, Coding Information) with a checkbox. As operators prepare documents for scanning, they check off the appropriate box for the document and place the separator sheet on top. Between the batch separator providing the meta data and the document separator providing the document ID, most of the indexes can be automatically attached to each image after scanning. A verify screen gives operators a chance to check the accuracy and fix any problems that come up during scanning.

The Results

The E-File system was installed and launched early in 2004 and immediately delivered benefits to Nationwide. By shifting labor from manual keying of indexes to the prep stage with the "smart" separator sheets, Datacap Components integrated with FileNet Capture provides Nationwide with the efficient solution they need to transform their massive volume of paper documents into images for FileNet.

The Nationwide business partner reports that they have realized a significant business impact. They are saving the office space required to store paper documents, they no longer need to track they location of the documents, and the huge reduction in processing time means records are available to their service centers much quicker. E-File represents the biggest productivity improvement for Nationwide service centers in the past 20 years. In addition, it is a very simple application to learn and use.