webMethods BPMS Speeds Processing of 7,500 Pieces of Mail – From Days to Hours

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

• Business Operation

• System Integration

The UNIQA Group insurance companies receive thousands of paper documents by mail every day. Sorting and forwarding these documents for action was taking too much time and effort, which is why UNIQA sought an automated business process management solution. Its goals were to shorten processing times, lower administrative costs and better distribute the workload to speed up processing. In the past, document distribution was time- and staff-intensive. It could take several days before documents finally reached the right administrator, who then had to scan them for documentation and archiving purposes.

The UNIQA Group Austria is one of Central Europe’s leading insurance groups and deliberately combines Austrian identity with a European system. Since its founding in 1999, the UNIQA Group has quickly established itself in Austria as well as in the Central and Eastern European markets. Today, UNIQA is represented in 20 countries by 40 insurance companies. With 7 million customers groupwide, almost 15 million contracts and a premium volume of €5.8 billion, UNIQA is one of the most dynamic groups of companies in Central Europe.

With the help of the webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), UNIQA automated the entire process for its Austrian offices—from receiving to processing paperwork—and has created a viable foundation for future process optimization projects. Now webMethods BPMS automates the document-handling process, which begins with an outsourcing partner of UNIQA. There, incoming documents are scanned via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or manually due to unclear answers on forms, bad handwriting or use of images. The documents are then classified according to various criteria for further processing and transmitted with the corresponding metadata at intervals of 15 minutes to UNIQA’s Braintribe DMS by Software AG’s technology partner of the same name. Braintribe then begins an individual process for each next step. Using rules provided by UNIQA, the webMethods BPMS manages the entire document flow up to the delivery in electronic in-baskets. From those in-baskets, administrators are assigned tasks at their workstations based on centrally defined filter criteria.

• Faster distribution of up to 7,500 pieces of mail/day
• More accurate assignment of documents to the responsible administrators, from the start
• Improved tracking of each document

• Shorter processing times— from several days to one to two hours
• Higher productivity—scanning no longer needed