Incoming Post Solution at Unternehmensgruppe Deutscher Ring Hamburg

Initial Situation		The Deutscher Ring Hamburg Group employs approx. 1,500 members of staff at its headquarters in Hamburg and about a further 900 in agencies and branches. Business is divided into Life Assurance, Property Insurance, Health Insurance, Mortgages and Financial Services. More than 600,000 people are insured by the Deutscher Ring Krankenversicherungsverein a.G. (Deutscher Ring Health Insurance Association). Post sent by these clients to the insurance office was hitherto processed in the post room and a special Service Department, before being subsequently forwarded to the relevant member of staff via the in-house post. Much time was lost before settlements could be effected, since mail had to be transported physically and the required files fetched from the archive. Settlement was carried out using an IBM Host application, whereby the member of staff entered the necessary data directly from the paper onto a Host form.
Requirements		In the field of health insurance, settlement calculation was to be transformed from a paper-based processing system to a non-paper system in order to provide quicker and more efficient processing. The extensive paper archive was thereby to be completely dispensed with.
Project Description		A project team made up of staff from Deutscher Ring and IBM initially carried out an analysis of the status quo. Having recorded the requirements and created a solution concept in collaboration with the client's departments, including an architectural plan, the next project stage implemented the jointly created concept. This involved developing a capturing system based on InputAccel, which uses PROSAR-AIDA for automatic indexing. Non-automatically indexed data was added manually using PROKEY. The capturing system's capacity was set at a speed of approx. 3,000 pages per hour. The necessary recognition performance was provided by a single PC using PROSAR-AIDA. A maximum of 4 work stations with PROKEY were available for subsequent corrections. The capturing system produces fully indexed processes within an electronic procedural control system, by which processes are forwarded to the relevant member of staff automatically. That member of staff's work station has an interface connecting the electronic mailbox and the archive system with the Host application. The project began in February 2000 with a concept stage. Implementation began in April and was completed in early August after the system's successful technical inspection. Production was launched without any faults, whilst the initially small number of pilot users was increased to the intended 49 users.
Benefits		The staff of Deutscher Ring has access to incoming post immediately after its arrival, as well as access to the archive in the case of client queries. Moreover, several departments can now access documents simultaneously, as well as being able to electronically forward them to other groups. By installing the central archiving system, Deutscher Ring has created the preconditions for electronically archiving documents in other departments within Deutscher Ring, with a view to developing an overall Group archive. At a later date, access from external offices will be possible using the intranet/Internet. Besides an improvement in quality, Deutscher Ring also expects quantitative benefits from the following project stages. These are mainly based on extensive automatic indexing using PROSAR-AIDA, which would make both pre-sorting of incoming mail and manual data-entry unnecessary.
Prospects		On the basis of the positive project development to date, Deutscher Ring has decided to initially extend the productive system to a total of 200 users. This project phase is currently being implemented. In the long term, the DMS solutions applied to Health Insurance will be applied to all departments.
Contacts		at Deutscher Ring: Dr. Marion Bartels und Jochen Hönack at IBM: Ingo Bahrs, Tel. +49 511 516-3121 at Paradatec: Bernt v. Nottbeck, Tel. +49 531 23815-0