Case Study – Insurance
The Equitable
Global Leader Reduces Costs and Provides Faster Policy Production Turnaround
The Equitable Companies Incorporated, a member of the AXA Group, is one of the world's leading insurance and investment management organizations. The company services millions of individuals, Fortune 500 corporations and institutions through several key holdings: The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States (The Equitable), its flagship business; more than 50 percent stake in Alliance Capital Management; and majority ownership of Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, a Wall Street brokerage and investment banking firm. The Equitable ranks as the 8th largest life Insurance company in the United States with more than $239 billion of individual life insurance and $38 billion of annuity contracts.
The Equitable's customers give critical status to comprehensive life-cycle products, while placing a premium on service. This degree of expectation is particularly important to the Equitable's Regulatory and Compliance Product Support Group, which prepares, files and produces life insurance policy forms.
The group was dissatisfied with how it was drafting, filing and keeping lists of policy forms. These inefficient manual processes were neither time, nor cost-effective. Another problem the company identified was its practice of outsourcing the printing of forms. This was a prominent contributing factor to the overall inefficiency of the group, as well as to the expenditure of millions of dollars. Specifically, the volume of insurance forms produced by outside printers required a physical storage and inventory at one of four service centers around the country. More importantly, the content of the forms were subject to human error and sudden changes in state regulatory guidelines, which both necessitated expensive emergency printing of new policy material and the vanquishing of old materials.
The specific challenges confronted by the Equitable were quite familiar to Document Sciences Corporation, which had proven success as a major provider of dynamic content publishing solutions to the insurance industry. The Equitable reviewed and selected the Document Sciences' solution, which includes a powerful and flexible document composition engine that composes variable, personalized business documents, and a software application for the creation, revision, management and assembly of document components used in the contract and policy applications.
Document Sciences' fully automated document architecture provided The Equitable with a platform to develop, manage and process the various life insurance forms on the mainframe and on the PC. The documents could then be output on-demand via its production printers. The overall solution architecture is an integrated suite of modules that can produce high-volume documents in a batch production environment without user interaction.