Digital Mailroom is on Track to Save $1.5 Million — A Captiva Success Story
American Express is one of the world's leading financial service institutions, managing more than $232 billion in assets. It has enjoyed tremendous cost savings, increased data accuracy and improved client service by automating its financial advisory business group mailroom. The American Express Financial Advisors (AEFA) group helps customers set up savings accounts, roll over IRAs, perform estate and tax planning and even purchase auto and life insurance. The group receives more than 210,000 incoming client service documents every day, such as account applications and change of address forms. The mailroom staff must process over 700 different types of documents (many of which are handwritten, such as checks) and time-sensitive financial data that must be captured with complete accuracy.
The group processed most of the documents in-house, but outsourced about 30% of the task. Unfortunately, the processes employed by the outsourcing firm were slow and the firm scanned only 25 pages per minute. The in-house group manually processed the other 70% of the documents. Faced with sluggish processing rates and an ever-escalating volume of incoming customer documents, AEFA decided to overhaul the document processing system and set a goal to deliver customer requests electronically to department desktops for processing. The group desired a solution that could capture, classify and deliver all client service forms starting at the mailroom, and speed document processing while concurrently increasing data accuracy. The group furthermore required that the solution be flexible enough to adapt to its existing back-end information systems, scalable enough to adjust to fluctuating volumes of documents and comprehensive enough to capture not just paper, but to potentially capture electronic data streams as well.
The Solution
AEFA knew its requirements necessitated a new approach to mail processing, and hired an outside consulting firm to review its existing processes and recommend changes. The consultants' first recommendation was that imaging cease being outsourced and be brought in-house. Next, the consultants concluded that by creating a system utilizing high-speed scanners and input management software, the department would be able to automatically identify captured client forms, append routing directives and reliably apply its business rules to its information workflow—all under one roof. This approach would virtually eliminate manual sorting and prepping of documents, and increase accuracy, throughput and productivity in the mailroom and, in turn, other business areas.
The group selected Captiva to provide a comprehensive, automated mailroom solution to capture and help process incoming client service documents. The system would combine Captiva's FormWare with three high-speed scanners, creating a "digital mailroom" that would scan, classify, capture, perfect and help deliver client information to the appropriate department for processing, and concurrently eliminate all post-process scanning.
First, documents of varying size, content and processing requirements are prepped for scanning using document separators between types of documents that form a case, or batch. Documents are then scanned and the images are delivered into the FormWare platform. FormWare performs various image pre-processing functions to ensure readability, and then submits enhanced images into its recognition engine, which employs optical character recognition and document identification to determine document type and content, and then extracts the necessary data.
Following identification and classification of the input streams, Captiva's technology applies the specific business rules and routing requirements to ensure data is valid and may be delivered accordingly into the departments' back-end systems. The solution then passes the data, including document type and index field information, into the group's back-end workflow for routing.
The Results
System implementation was successfully completed within a six-month window. The group is now scanning—in-house—about 3,000 client folder batches per hour at a rate of about 190 pages per minute, a remarkable increase over the 25 pages per minute rate that was previously captured externally. The AEFA group has also increased indexing productivity from 45 seconds per document to an average of only 12 seconds, and has reduced manual processing on most every level, which has dramatically reduced opportunities for error and increased data accuracy. Perhaps most significantly, the group is now able to process more documents with less staff, and has reduced the amount of full-time employees needed to complete processing from 95 to 45. With the average salary of these employees around $30,000 annually, the group is on track to recognize an immediate system ROI of approximately $1.5 million.
AEFA is now maintaining the system on its own. The group is considering employing its excess capacity to process the work of other business units.
Captiva Software Corporation (NASDAQ: CPTV) is a leading provider of input management solutions. Since 1989, Captiva's award-winning products have been used to manage business-critical information from paper, faxed and scanned forms and documents, Internet forms and XML data streams into the enterprise in a more accurate, timely and cost-effective manner. These products automate the processing of billions of forms and documents annually, converting their contents into information that is usable in database, document, content and other information management systems. Captiva's technology serves thousands of users in insurance, financial services, government, business process outsourcing, direct marketing and other markets. For more information, visit Captiva Software Corporation