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Aon Corporation, headquartered in Chicago, is a US Fortune 500 company, trading on the New York (NYSE: AOC), London and Chicago stock exchanges. It is a world leader in risk management, retail, reinsurance and wholesale brokerage, claims management, specialty services and human capital consulting services.
Aon has an employee base of 55,000 people, working in 600 offices in more than 125 countries around the globe and when one of those offices encountered a problem it employed the axiom ‘Think globally – Act locally’.
Business Issue - Time and Space
Aon New Zealand is headquartered in Auckland, and is contributing to the parent company’s exponential growth with turnover rising over a three year period from NZ $1 million to NZ $10 million. The company is adding 250-300 new clients each week, whose interests are overseen by some 800 advisors. The takeover of another company meant Aon was facing the addition of more than 400 advisors and another 45,000 clients. All of which was producing a paper avalanche which was threatening to swamp Aon Risk Services (NZ) Ltd’s Wellington Center, whose work is based around personal lines of insurance marketed via the Internet.
The Wellington center may market via the Internet, but their work is based on paper – a number of documents for each and every client. Each client’s documents were retained in a hard copy file, housed in 8 or 9 six-drawer filing cabinets, eating up valuable office space, and providing enough work to keep 2.5 people fully employed just trying to keep up with the flow. Facing the sudden influx of a greater than normal volume of new clients, Colin Miles, Aon Group’s Insurance Services Division’s Executive Director, realized something had to be done.
Solution
The group’s IT management recommended a trial of Onstream Systems’ Trapeze Vault, a web-based image repository management system. Basically the system scans in and indexes images of all paper documents, allowing for fast retrieval and the ability to share documents via networks or over the web.
“Almost immediately the customer service center’s 10-person team realized the labor, cost and efficiency advantages of using the software,” said Mr. Miles. “We decided we really liked the software and went ahead and purchased it. It’s excellent for what we do.”
The software has been networked to the ten customer service desks in the ‘extraordinarily busy’ unit, where all customer documents are scanned on receipt and can be called up at will from any desk.
“It’s been incredibly cost and space effective,” continued Mr. Jones, noting that all documents, once scanned are boxed and sent to an archive warehouse, from where they can be easily retrieved under the daily scan date and file reference if they should ever be required. Mr. Miles estimates that the savings for his organization in the first year of operation of the software will amount to between NZ $60,000 and NZ $80,000, with ongoing annual savings in the region of NZ $30,000 to NZ $40,000.
Colin Miles and his staff are full of praise for the system, but with one important caveat. You need a scanner that can keep up with the system – their initial scanner proved too small to handle the increasing workload, but a faster model has them back on track.
The paper influx has greatly increased from the pre-Trapeze days when it took 2.5 people to keep up with it – now it takes just one person 2.5 hours a day to scan all the paperwork, causing Mr. Miles to comment that “If the scanned document is not on the system, it has not been received!”
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