Established in 1893, Stewart Title Corporation, headquartered in Houston, Texas, provides title insurance and related services through more than 6,200 issuing locations in the United States and several international markets. With a record of leveraging new technologies to speed customer service, Stewart recently upgraded its title processing capabilities using Datacap's Taskmaster Web scanning and indexing software, linked to a Stellent (formerly Optika) Acorde document management system. As a result, Stewart reduced the time to process an order in Houston from days to less than an hour, and reduced its operating cost in the process.
The initiative was so successful that, only months after rolling out the centralized Datacap system, Stewart opted to take advantage of Taskmaster Web's browser-based document scanning and indexing capabilities to roll the product to district offices. They now scan, index and forward document images and data to the Houston data center. As district offices sign on to the new program, Stewart is eliminating the shipping of paper policies and copies to Houston, and shortening the process of registering and archiving policies to the Optika Imaging system from several days to a matter of minutes.
While planning an upgrade to Acorde, for imaging and document management, Stewart's IT subsidiary, Landata Systems, Inc., began to search for a scanning solution that could capture and release images to Optika Acorde for storage and retrieval at its Houston headquarters.
With mortgage refinancing at an all-time high, Stewart is managing an increasing volume of data coming from thousands of locations all over North America and overseas. The company's Accounting and National Legal departments receive about 5,000 pages every day, most of them title insurance policies. Some documents are up to 60 pages long and there are a wide variety of formats, so Landata ruled out OCR in favor of a simple document indexing strategy. They began searching for a document scanning solution that could enable 22 data entry operators to manually enter ten to twenty index fields, such as policy number and agency ID number, and populate Stewart's searchable Prior Files database.
After evaluating several proposals, Landata selected Datacap Taskmaster Web, an XML-driven scanning and indexing solution. Not only did it contain all the elements Stewart had sought, but by requiring only a standard browser for index operators, rather than software installed on 22 client stations, Taskmaster Web offered an easy solution for implementation and administration.
With a Taskmaster thin client implementation, Stewart's network administrator simply assigns a password and a set of permissions for each operator. To start each day, index operators open a browser and log-in with their password to the Taskmaster Web Server and batches of document images are delivered with an accompanying data entry panel. Each document type has a corresponding data entry panel and operators can quickly and easily fill in the required fields. The Taskmaster Web server tracks every document, manages each operator's workload, and uploads the images and data to Acorde and the important Stewart Prior Files database.
"Taskmaster Web has given Stewart the capability to increase efficiency by allowing data management at the local level with a significant cost savings," said Elana Yonko, product specialist for Landata Systems. "It is a customizable, scalable, web-based tool that is easy for our users to learn."
As users in Houston quickly became fluent in the system, Stewart saw an opportunity to extend the Taskmaster Web to link remote locations to Houston and further reduce costs and speed turnaround time. Landata developed Phase Two for the document capture solution and designated two district offices, one in Virginia and another in South Carolina, as remote locations for a pilot system to relay images and index data to Houston for processing.
Once the remote pilot system was operational by late 2002. Stewart employees in Virginia and South Carolina began following the same procedure as index operators in Houston. "Go online, scan documents, index key fields, upload it to the server and you're done," said Elena Yonko.
Phase Three is a company-wide implementation made available to Stewart offices with document scanners, now being rolled out internally. "There is virtually no cost to the offices, because we have purchased all the licenses necessary," said Yonko. "The only hardware requirement is a scanner, which many district offices already have." In fact, the Virginia location is using a digital copy machine as a scanner, with no loss of image quality.
Stewart has leveraged the capabilities of Taskmaster Web for both centralized and remote capture and in the process they have accelerated policy processing. "The biggest benefit to district offices is that they can send data electronically to Houston, eliminating the need to send paper policies and policy copies," observed Yonko. "It also allows quicker turnaround time for getting policies on Stewart Prior Files, which is the system holding all searchable prior file data."
"We designed Taskmaster Web for companies who need a reliable, web-based scanning and indexing solution, locally or remotely" said Scott Blau, CEO of Datacap. "Taskmaster Web offers the simplest way to automate indexing of documents to reduce cost and increase productivity. Stewart Title's requirements are a perfect match for its capabilities."