CLIENT OVERVIEW
Founded in 1925, Acuity Insurance, a mutual insurance company, provides property and casualty insurance products for consumers and businesses across 28 states in the United States. As an organization, Acuity relentlessly focuses on innovative ways to improve efficiency an increase productivity in order to deliver high-quality products and servi to its customers and agents. Acuity insures over 125,000 businesses, including 325,000 commercial vehicles, and nearly half a million homes and private passenger autos. The company is headquartered in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Acuity relied largely on legacy technologies for their documentation needs; outdated technologies such as XICS and Microsoft Word were used for forms across various services, including applications, claims, audit, and loss control. The company was digitalizing documents manually which was a tedious task and prone to errors. Chris Lensmeyer, Director – Business Systems added, “These outdated technologies were non-compliant with the seamless customer correspondence experience that we wanted to provide.” With XICS support coming to an end, Acuity set out to look for a CCM platform in the market that would meet their growing needs for documents now and into the future.
With the goal of centralizing forms and enabling the delivery of personalized and multi-channel customer communications, Acuity decided to implement the OpenText Exstream CCM platform for its capabilities of enhancing one-to-one customer interactions and improving customer experience. For the herculean task of converting 7,000 forms within a reasonable timeframe, Acuity wanted to leverage the support of an IT services partner since it would require significant resources and technical expertise.
SOLUTION OFFERED
Acuity chose ValueMomentum as its IT services partner for its insurance domain experience and technical implementation expertise, specifically for the OpenText Exstream platform. With the help of ValueMomentum, Acuity built an enterprise-wide architecture to support the CCM platform. OpenText Exstream, including Empower and EWS running on the WebSphere application server, was integrated with Acuity’s home-grown applications and their existing forms portal. Over a 36-month period, a team of 35 resources consisting of project managers, developers, and business units—from Acuity IT staff, ValueMomentum, and OpenText—deployed the CCM platform on-premise. The deployment was done in three phases of over 12 months each: 1. creating a GUI, 2. integrating the platform, and 3. converting forms. Once deployed, an agile sprint framework was adopted for the migration of forms.
Speaking about the collaboration and execution of the project, Jim Glavan, General Manager – Information Technology stated, “ValueMomentum’s team exhibits a strong sense of ownership, and their technical expertise brought efficiency to the implementation as well as ensured high quality in the development of our forms.”
“ValueMomentum’s team exhibits a strong sense of ownership, and their technical expertise brought efficiency to the implementation as well as ensured high quality in the development of our forms.”
VALUE DELIVERED
Implementing an enterprise CCM platform that integrated with Acuity’s core systems enabled them to automate their documentation process. The new intuitive, on-demand portal-based platform allowed Acuity to rationalize around 28% of total forms, remove 15% of forms that were redundant, and provide users access to the centralized repository of most up-to-date versions of forms. The automation also reduced forms maintenance resources by 65%. Other key productivity measures include 1,250 business and IT user hours saved in 2017 at the outset, with 9,000 IT hours and 70,000 business user hours projected to be saved by 2022. The modern OpenText Exstream platform enabled Acuity to save time spent on the conversion of forms by 50 percent. Moreover, the streamlined documentation process and consistency across forms helped Acuity to focus on critical business areas that will contribute to their business growth. Empower implementation enabled the end-users to submit the updated forms to the centralized print from anywhere. During the unprecedented times of COVID-19, it has been highly helpful to all the stakeholders with everyone working remotely.
Acuity attributed the success of this project to OpenText Exstream and Empower functionalities, effective collaboration between business units and ValueMomentum, and the focus on user training. On the partnership with ValueMomentum, Chris commented, “ValueMomentum is an integral part of Acuity’s team. I do not need to worry about any iterations required in our development and migration processes to suit the evolving customer needs. They take on any new requirements proactively.”
