Case Study – Insurance and Financial Services
American United Life
Time to Market Improved by 50%, New Products Launched Simultaneously
American United Life Insurance Company (AUL), based in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a Financial Services company offering 401(k) and other retirement plans, individual, group and credit insurance, and annuities. The company has three operating divisions, which provide products targeted to different audiences and distribution channels: AUL Retirement Services, Group Division and Individual Operations. AUL, which is a subsidiary of OneAmerica Financial Partners, Inc., has nearly $10 billion in assets and more than $200 billion in life insurance in force.
It used to take a significant effort for AUL to produce all of the changes required by state regulatory agencies to its individual products policies. Every edit to the standard policy, even a single word, meant mainframe programming, which had to be prioritized against other IT projects. Meanwhile, marketing hesitated to introduce new products into states where policy pages weren't yet ready, resulting in lost revenue opportunity.
When the company did go ahead with regional rollouts, producers often had to wait before beginning to sell the product—by that time, information had been forgotten, enthusiasm and momentum lost.
AUL Individual Operations, a long-time Document Sciences customer, solved these problems by installing a new, easy-to-use front-end to its automated composition system. The Document Sciences software now enables AUL business users to develop new policies themselves at their desktops and to make state required changes when they receive them from state agencies.
The software includes graphical tools for defining a document's structure and specifying business logic that determines how text components will be assembled and which data will be pulled off of the company's administration system during batch production for insertion into the personalization fields of individual policies. Automated document assembly can be previewed on the business user's workstation, with test pages output to local printers.
The process is efficient because the business experts who understand policy content and know what state regulators want are the ones creating and editing the documents. When questions arise they can be answered within the department where the work is being done.
Accuracy has improved because programmers are no longer re-keying documents, and pages no longer need to make several circuits between IT and the business groups. Always-scarce IT programming resources have been freed for other projects.