ISIS PAPYRUS CASE STUDIES

Lutheran Brotherhood's Total Correspondence Solution

"External Consistency - Internal Efficiency"

...Reasons stated for choosing Papyrus were the powerful WYSIWYG design tool with the library facilities to enhance and promote re-use of document objects...

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.