Download PDF
Sigma Financial: Providing Personalized, yet Efficient Customer Service
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Regulatory Compliance Monitoring
- Remote Asset Management
- Fraud Detection
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
Sigma Financial, a premier full-service financial broker dealer, was facing several challenges related to document management. Every morning, the mailroom staff had to open 100-150 overnight envelopes containing 220-250 sales forms that were 8-10 pages in length. The 'original' was sent to the Compliance department for approval, and once approved, the form went to the Sales Processing department who sent the 'original', via overnight mail, to the appropriate fund company. The 'copy' was sent to the Commissions department, where the information was manually input into Sigma’s commissions program, giving the rep credit for the sale. The 'copy' was then filed by rep’s name in Sigma’s dedicated file room. Most of the records stored there needed to be kept on file for seven years and a few document types needed to be stored indefinitely. Processing a sales form was at least a two-day process. Average document retrieval time was anywhere from 10-15 minutes per form and usually 20-30 forms were accessed daily. Retrieving, refiling and just keeping track of pulled files was made even more difficult because all of Sigma’s corporate employees had access to the file room. Furthermore, Sigma was running out of room and would need to add additional filing space and personnel.
About The Customer
Sigma Financial, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a premier full-service financial broker dealer. Established in 1983, Sigma’s corporate office employs 90 people and through a joint venture with Midland National Life Insurance they boast a network of over 1400 independent representatives located in 48 states. Sigma sells a broad assortment of financial products ranging from traditional brokerage accounts to financial planning services to disability insurance. Sigma positions itself as a 'family' or personalized broker dealer. In a world of automated phone attendants, Sigma still has live receptionists answering the phones and directing calls in a friendly manner. The company has won the Broker Dealer of the Year Award from the Investment Advisor Fax Poll in seven of the last ten years. Sigma’s big differentiator when it comes to attracting high-quality representatives, is the technology support it provides its reps.
The Solution
Sigma’s electronic document management solution consists of a DocuWare System License, as well as the DocuWare ACTIVE IMPORT and CDMAKER modules. A Canon 4050 scanner and CD Rom Jukebox were also purchased for the solution. Five FULL FUNCTION licenses and five READ/ONLY licenses provide all of Sigma’s corporate employees with access to DocuWare. Four to six employees use DocuWare on a daily basis, the rest hop in and out of the program to collect the information they need. Once DocuWare was implemented, a workflow process to manage the sales forms was set up and slowly introduced to the reps as the Sales Fax Admissions Program. Sigma developed a fax coversheet which compiled all the important information from the 8-10 page sales forms onto one page. This allowed Sigma to 'standardize' the constantly changing sales forms of hundreds of different funds and quickly and easily view the information that was used as the index fields in the DocuWare file cabinet. When a sales form is faxed to corporate headquarters, DocuWare’s ACTIVE IMPORT module reads the information from the coversheet, and automatically indexes the document and places it in a DocuWare basket for the Compliance department to review.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Real-time In-vehicle Monitoring
The telematic solution provides this vital premium-adjusting information. The solution also helps detect and deter vehicle or trailer theft – as soon as a theft occurs, monitoring personnel can alert the appropriate authorities, providing an exact location.“With more and more insurance companies and major fleet operators interested in monitoring driver behaviour on the grounds of road safety, efficient logistics and costs, the market for this type of device and associated e-business services is growing rapidly within Italy and the rest of Europe,” says Franco.“The insurance companies are especially interested in the pay-per-use and pay-as-you-drive applications while other organisations employ the technology for road user charging.”“One million vehicles in Italy currently carry such devices and forecasts indicate that the European market will increase tenfold by 2014.However, for our technology to work effectively, we needed a highly reliable wireless data network to carry the information between the vehicles and monitoring stations.”
Case Study
Safety First with Folksam
The competitiveness of the car insurance market is driving UBI growth as a means for insurance companies to differentiate their customer propositions as well as improving operational efficiency. An insurance model - usage-based insurance ("UBI") - offers possibilities for insurers to do more efficient market segmentation and accurate risk assessment and pricing. Insurers require an IoT solution for the purpose of data collection and performance analysis
Case Study
Smooth Transition to Energy Savings
The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.
Case Study
Automated Pallet Labeling Solution for SPR Packaging
SPR Packaging, an American supplier of packaging solutions, was in search of an automated pallet labeling solution that could meet their immediate and future needs. They aimed to equip their lines with automatic printer applicators, but also required a solution that could interface with their accounting software. The challenge was to find a system that could read a 2D code on pallets at the stretch wrapper, track the pallet, and flag any pallets with unread barcodes for inspection. The pallets could be single or double stacked, and the system needed to be able to differentiate between the two. SPR Packaging sought a system integrator with extensive experience in advanced printing and tracking solutions to provide a complete traceability system.
Case Study
Transforming insurance pricing while improving driver safety
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the car insurance industry on a scale not seen since the introduction of the car itself. For decades, premiums have been calculated using proxy-based risk assessment models and historical data. Today, a growing number of innovative companies such as Quebec-based Industrielle Alliance are moving to usage-based insurance (UBI) models, driven by the advancement of telematics technologies and smart tracking devices.
Case Study
MasterCard Improves Customer Experience Through Self-Service Data Prep
Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, oversees the validation of transactions and cash between two systems, whether they’re MasterCard owned or not. He was charged with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve MasterCard processes. At the outset, the 13-person team had to manually reconcile system interfaces using reports that resided on the company’s mainframe. Their first order of business each day was to print 20-30 individual, multi-page reports. Using a ruler to keep their place within each report, they would then hand-key the relevant data, line by line, into Excel for validation. “We’re talking about a task that took 40-80 hours each week,” recalls Madison, “As a growing company with rapidly expanding product offerings, we had to find a better way to prepare this data for analysis.”
