Ilmarinen Boosts productivity and client satisfaction with instant access to pension and investment documents

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage

• Business Operation

• System Integration

Ilmarinen, an insurer, needs to store vital policy documents securely for more than 50 years. However, it also needs to keep this information easily accessible for use in day-to-day business processes. The pensions and investments sector is a document-heavy business. The term of an investment might be 20 years, while the management and payment of a pension might encompass 70 years or more – and over that time, hundreds of documents, letters, emails and other correspondence may need to be recorded and managed. As insurers become more focused on winning and retaining customer loyalty, it is vital to ensure that employees are able to navigate through this mass of documentation efficiently. To gain new insight into the right actions and offers for each customer, you need to build a 360-degree view of that individual from their document history. At the same time, from a legal perspective, all these documents need to be stored securely – often for many years after the pension or investment has ceased to be active.

Ilmarinen’s task is to ensure that over 900,000 people employed in Finland receive the pension they have earned from their employment. Backed by 550 experts in the field, the company helps its clients succeed, and helps their employees enjoy their work and spend a healthy and happy retirement. The company’s productivity and customer service depend on its ability to access information about each customer’s pensions quickly and easily. Yet its reputation with its customers and regulators depends on its ability to keep these important documents safe. Ilmarinen uses Microsoft SharePoint to manage and collaborate on active documents. The company decided to integrate SharePoint with a new enterprise content management platform that would provide seamless access to content (whether that content sits in a collaboration environment or in a digital archive), and also potentially act as a shared content services platform for unifying access to content held in other systems in the future.

Ilmarinen uses Microsoft SharePoint to manage and collaborate on active documents. The company decided to integrate SharePoint with a new enterprise content management platform that would provide seamless access to content (whether that content sits in a collaboration environment or in a digital archive), and also potentially act as a shared content services platform for unifying access to content held in other systems in the future. Working with Elinar, an IBM Business Partner that specializes in enterprise content management solutions for the Finnish insurance sector, the Ilmarinen team used IBM Content Navigator to provide an intuitive user interface that plugs into SharePoint. The new interface empowers users to commit, find, manage and retrieve documents from both active repositories and a long-term archive which is built on the IBM FileNet Content Manager and Records Management platform. The solution is known as “Holvi” – the Finnish word for “vault”. The solution has already enabled significant savings by enabling Ilmarinen to dispose of its physical archive – eliminating the costs of printing and storing paper documents, and of transporting copies off-site to another secure location.

• Document retrieval is a significantly more efficient process for Ilmarinen. Instead of going downstairs to the vault, users can simply click on Holvi within their SharePoint browser window, and click through to the files they need.
• Ilmarinen’s users have quickly come to trust Holvi as a fast, secure and reliable source of information, and it has become critical for many of the company’s core business processes.
• The solution is also helping to improve customer service. For example, when a client asks a question, the Ilmarinen team has the relevant information at its fingertips, and can respond straight away – with confidence that they have the most current content and the latest versions of all documents.

• Significant savings by enabling Ilmarinen to dispose of its physical archive – eliminating the costs of printing and storing paper documents, and of transporting copies off-site to another secure location.