| Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Lutheran Brotherhood
and its affiliated companies manage more than $23 billion
in assets for the organization's members. Lutheran Brotherhood
provides high quality financial products and services
to its 1.1 million members through a network of 1,450
general agents and district representatives.
Products and services offered include insurance products
such as Life, Health, Property and Casualty, other financial
products such as mutual funds, annuities, and asset
management accounts.
Lutheran Brotherhood contracted Perot Systems to partner
with them to accomplish a three-year reengineering effort.
Blended teams of Perot Systems and Lutheran Brotherhood
employees are developing new technology to enable redesigned
service and support processes and organizational structures
to refocus on the customer relationship. The customer
should be able to see the company not as a series of
individual departments but as a single entity focused
on providing complete service.
The correspondence system, closely related to electronic
forms and process automation, was one key area of intended
functional improvement. Correspondence was performed
by 15 separate software packages including several PC
text products, causing an inconsistent feel with extensive
manual labor for preparation and post processing. The
lack of automated version control caused substantial
coordination and management effort as documents went
through their change cycle. Of the 1,000,000 letters
generated each year, more than 90 percent included some
manual processes before they reached the mail center.
The project team identified a number of key issues
including the need for technical integration with legacy
systems, archiving and retrieval of documents, letter
evaluation, standardization, common letterhead and templates
to achieve the “One Voice and One Look” corporate objective.
The “Request for Solution” process produced a short
list of three vendors that were invited to present their
solution on site. Supplemental demos to user and IT
departments and reference checks with current Papyrus
users completed the selection process. ISIS suggested
and performed a three week Proof-Of-Concept Workshop
in which a sample letter set, a user GUI, letter bundling
and printing to the Xerox printers was implemented and
verified. Reasons stated for choosing Papyrus were the
powerful WYSIWYG design tool with the library facilities
to enhance and promote re-use of document objects, the
ability to perform administration by business users
rather than by IT professionals, and the strong output
management features with sorting, grouping and enveloping
controls with OMR and barcode. The integration of the
existing Xerox 4135s and PCL network printers, with
the option for future fax and e-mail distribution from
a SINGLE DESIGN, were essential simplifications to Lutheran
Brotherhood and Perot Systems.
The first phase of mainframe automated letter generation
was successfully completed and Lutheran Brotherhood,
Perot Systems and ISIS are now implementing the Windows
NT based individual letter solution with centralized
bundling and sorting through the Papyrus PrintPool on
OS/390. Approximately 15% of the total volume of correspondence
is currently using the new system.
The business benefits achieved - in addition to the
improved quality of communication with the members -
include increased automation and reliability, substantial
reduction in labor costs and postal costs and simplified
system maintenance. |
“External
Consistency - 
