Sep 19, 2007
21st Century Insurance:
An InfoPrint Solutions Company Case Study
Client
21st Century Insurance Insurance started out in 1958 as a one-man insurance operation, and now has blossomed into a 2,500-employee auto insurance success story. Today, 21st insures over 1.5 million vehicles across the US, across 18 states, including California, Florida, New Jersey, Texas and the company's newest market, New York. This geographical reach makes the company one of the largest direct-to-consumer personal auto insurance providers in the country.
Industry
21st Century Insurance prides itself on customer service and printed output is an important part of its customer communications. Added to this an aggressive marketing effort as part of the company’s multi-year geographic expansion strategy - which increased the percentage of the U.S. private passenger automobile market in which 21st Century Insurance operates from approximately 18% in 2003 to approximately 66% currently – meant a huge increase in demand for printed materials.
Challenge
Like many fast growing companies, the 21st Century Insurance internal print/mail operation had not grown in sophistication as the company’s customer base grew. The internal team was using cut-sheet printers for all materials creation, which are much slower than the continuous forms printers used today. The Inserters 21st Century Insurance was using were also outdated, meaning many documents were lost of damaged during the inserting process. Added to this the need to reduce print times, decrease spending on printing and meeting future state and Federal communications compliance requirements were also key factors.
Solution
21st Century Insurance implemented an end-to-end document workflow management solution - InfoPrint Workflow - from the Ricoh | IBM InfoPrint Solutions Company (IPS).
A true end-to-end, workflow management and control solution for automating and transforming enterprise document production and distribution, the IPW solution is designed to enable businesses to increase output efficiency, improve document integrity and help reduce costs. IPW takes care of converting print data from the proprietary Xerox Metacode format to AFP, the industry standard for high-volume transaction print; adding 2-d barcodes to the pages; and generating the necessary inserter control files for “file-based” Kern inserters – all without any modifications to existing mainframe print-generation programs.
Result
In merely weeks, IPS had designed, delivered and completed the installation of IPW from start to finish. “We are extremely pleased with the solution that InfoPrint Solutions Company designed and built for us,” said Jim Chalker, Director of IT at 21st Century Insurance Group. “The InfoPrint solution enabled us to replace a number of existing systems, improve operational efficiency and increase our printing speeds. Better yet, the solution can adapt and grow to meet our future needs.”
The solution has significantly improved printed customer communications integrity by tracking each individual mailpiece through the complete print/mail process and providing the automated reprint of any documents lost or damaged during inserting. Additionally, by helping to replace cut-sheet printers with high-speed continuous forms printers and outdated inserters with new file-based inserters, it has reduced print run times by 75% while automating the tracking and reporting of each step of the entire operation.