| Customer Type: | Private Sector | |
| Customer Business: | Benefits Enrollment | |
| Business Process Served: | Human Resources | |
| End-User Scope: | 10,000+ employees across the United States and Canada | |
| Year Developed: | 1999 | |
| Application Status: | Still in Use | |
| Organization Mail System: | MS Exchange/Outlook |
Estimated Annual Cost Savings Yielded: ~US$2.5 Million
Business Requirement
Business needed to significantly reduce the costs of printing over 10,000 health benefits information booklets, the costs associated with distributing these book, and automate/simplify the businesss processes associated with benefits enrollment.
Technologies Involved
IBM Lotus Notes and Domino
Inbound Fax
Eye and Hands OCR
Printer Farm
Embedded TIFF Viewer
SAP
How It Worked
In previous years, the company printed a 100+, four-color health benefits information book mailed to all of their employees. However, most employees only needed the information on four or five pages in the book. This meant that significant costs were incurred each year.
The new process leveraged IBM Lotus Notes & Domino technology to obtain employee information from SAP. This data was used to determine what information the employee would need based on their geographic location, marital status, dependents, and prior year enrollment. The application would then determine what sections of the book would be needed and sent the customized package to the company's printer farm for printing. The document package would then be mailed to the individual employees.
The employees would then complete the enrollment form and fax it to the Domino server. The server application would then off-load the documents to Eye and Hands OCR to retrieve the data from the forms. Any exceptions or errors would result in the document being returned to the application for manual reconciliation.
A temp-employee team would then review the stored TIFF documents through the Lotus Notes client, making whatever changes or corrections would be necessary. When completed, they would update the status as "ready".
Once the information wwas completed and ready, the data was the processed and packaged for export to SAP.
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