One Voice and One Look
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans achieves
corporate objective with a comprehensive Papyrus
correspondence/letter system.
Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Thrivent
Financial for Lutherans manages more than $65.4
billion in assets for the organization’s
members.
“Papyrus’ intuitive
development environment has permitted
us to shift document development to
business team members, allowing us
to redirect information technology
resources to more strategic endeavors.”
Daniel Seyfried, Application Analyst, Information Technology |
Thrivent Financial provides high quality
financial products and services to its 2.9
million members. Products and services offered
include insurance products such as Life, Health,
Property and Casualty, other financial products
include mutual funds, annuities, and asset
management accounts.
• One
Voice and One Look
The former company
Lutheran Brotherhood contracted ISIS in 1998
to implement the Papyrus Correspondence System.
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.
At the merger of Lutheran Brotherhood with
Aid Association for Lutherans, in 2002
they faced many of the same issues. The vast
majority of correspondence was done manually,
using a separate standalone application to
generate EACH LETTER. They had no reusability
and the process involved many manual steps.
The primary system used was WORD based with
templates and macros, everything ad-hoc, all
manual, along with the individual standalone
letter applications. For some of the letters
SAS and Ami Pro
was used.
• Papyrus
remains as the best system for their needs
Thrivent
Financial started looking for an overall
corporate solution to address both batch
and ad-hoc letters and found that Papyrus
remains the best system for their needs.
“This
combination can be done in one insertion job across the enterprise.” Dave
Carpentier, Manager of Document Systems Area. |
They liked the ability to do both using common
templates for a common look. Batch letters
are generated on z/OS, ad-hoc from Windows,
but all of them get bundled and printed together.
They were able to consolidate 2000 letters
to template based, shared use and get them
to market with a common generic system.
• Letters
are in the hands of business users
The
benefits came with the ease of development.
They needed to get business users involved
and had previously tried and failed with another
product. With Papyrus they were able to
get the bulk of letters into business users
hands to create. By pulling the effort into
the business area, the business can manage
prioritization and not be dependent on IT priorities.
• More
Benefits
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
were further important benefits.
Reasons stated for choosing Papyrus were the
powerful WYSIWYG design tool with the library
facilities to enhance and promote
re-use of document objects.
• Combining
all batch and ad-hoc letters in the PrintPool
All
user generated letters are sent to the Papyrus
PrintPool on the mainframe. A morning and
evening cycle of all letters is run combining
all batch and ad-hoc letters. ‘This combination
can be done in one insertion job across the
enterprise’ says Dave Carpentier, Manager
of Document Systems Area. 24 print streams
are being generated. The two primary ones go
directly to print/insert that contain the bulk
of the letters. Letters that require manual
intervention go back to the business areas.
Sometimes time-sensitive letters are
printed locally.
• Single
design - multi channel output
The
integration of the existing Xerox and PAL
network printers, with the option for fax
and e-mail distribution from a single design,
were essential simplifications to Thrivent Financial.
All letters generated are archived in Mobius.
• The business benefits achieved
- Improved quality of communication with
the members
- Increased automation and reliability
- Substantial reduction in labor costs
and postal costs
- Simplified system maintenance
MOTIVATIONS
for INNOVATION |
Motivation: |
Enforce
corporate identity in user-generated
letters |
Innovation: |
Integration of multiple letter generation
methods of two merged corporations into
one unified system |
Solution: |
Papyrus Correspondence System for batch
and interactive ad-hoc letter generation |
In their own words... |
The ISIS Papyrus Document System has allowed Thrivent
Financial to develop a solid correspondence system. With this system
we are able to deliver consistent, standardized documents and correspond
with our Members in a more effective, timely manner. Papyrus is a solid,
industrial strength platform.
Karl Koenig
Director, Member Systems
We have approximately 400 different letters or forms - all variable
print, including batch and ad-hoc (some letters are sent both ways).
We generated around 1 million letters in 2004. Our user base for Papyrus
Client is around 500. |
PAPYRUS PRODUCTS in use |
Papyrus Designer Package on Windows |
WYSIWYG dynamic document design
|
Papyrus DocEXEC on MVS |
High speed document formatting engine |
Papyrus WebRepository |
Document resource management |
Papyrus Host/MVS |
Integration of host business data into Papyrus |
Papyrus Server/PCL/PDF/Fax |
Printing, faxing and PDF generation |
Papyrus Client (500 users) |
Interactive, ad-hoc letter generation |
|
