At CIS Oregon (Citycounty Insurance Services), continual updates to a large body of living documents had caused a proliferation of duplicates, consuming limited space and making processes painfully inefficient. Now, circumstances are much improved. A case study details their experience transitioning to a document management system.
Eliminating the hassles of shared folders
Centralized document management adds functionality and control, while keeping people in their comfortable and familiar work environment. It provides:
- Automated versioning
- Full-text search and retrieval
- Workflow automation
- Metadata profiling and categorization
- File and Folder Automation (creating, naming)
- Efficient collaboration with faster decision-making
- Self-service access to files
- Integrations with SDK, ODBC, and Search
- Reporting and analytics
Insurance hinges on accuracy, and the records CIS uses are living documents. They’re also collaborative, passing through many hands. For CIS, effective document management isn’t just a routine chore. It’s mission-critical.
Multiple platforms, constant headaches
Before document management, finding a document required concentration, tenacity and luck. You couldn’t be sure if what you needed was on the shared server, buried in an email chain or saved to someone’s hard drive.
More concerning, if a team member edited a record in one location, those changes weren’t reflected anywhere else. If someone else modified the same record in a different location, the result was two documents (or three, or more), each with important but unreconciled updates. Resolving discrepancies took a line-by-line comparison of every version; even so, you couldn’t guarantee you’d caught it all.
CIS made a decision on their auditor’s suggestion. He had worked with many other insurance pools, and he knew there was a better way.
They chose a document management solution with the versioning capability that allows authors to edit a centralized file, and restore historical revisions. This dramatically improved the team’s efficiency. It was a value add to member owners too, who can now access more information, more easily. Consistency, accuracy, certainty while editing, simplified auditing and a more efficient use of space have all been achieved.
Versioning eliminated duplicates, ending the confusion
Multiple authors now take turns editing a file centrally, without churning out duplicates. They can assign a single file name to each record, so it’s easy to find what you need. For living documents that evolve over time, authors can use a previous report as a template, without losing historical versions – with revision history, it’s easy to retrieve archival documents.
“DL has been value added for us: we’ve been able to serve many more materials to our members efficiently, in ways we never could have done ten years ago.”
Lynn McNamara Executive Director, CIS DL Case Study
Request a Document Management Software demo or read the full CIS Oregon (Citycounty Insurance Services) case study and see how they increased efficiency.
