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Allianz removes walls of paper with open source ECM
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Allianz removes walls of paper with open source ECM
The paperless office may still be a pipe dream, but insurance giant Allianz has freed up prime CBD office space by replacing paper-based processes with the Alfresco open source enterprise content management system.
Tim Rynne, office automation manager at Allianz Australia Insurance, said although it was identified as a business requirement 18 months ago, the organisation had held off deploying a content system because it could not find one suited to its needs.
“We moved into a `paperless office` with lots of paper,” Rynne said. “We had a lot of paper, people were working in a new building with stacks of paper around their desks. A lot of it was Post-It notes.”
Allianz Australia is a subsidiary of the global Allianz Group and has some two million local policy holders, more than 300 staff and runs its IT shop with a good level of autonomy.
“We had a number of projects with document management components, but it was implemented in a special way,” Rynne said. “We have Notes content, paper and the classic file directories and direct attached storage.”
As part of a number of projects around BPM, it needs ECM (enterprise content management) for functionality that is “more than just storage” and at the same time wanted to reduce emissions and viewed paper as “part of the problem”.
Moving to electronic processes would also allow Allianz to move or eliminate physically stored content which, in the case of CBD office space, could translate into a hard ROI for the ECM project.
After a three-month evaluation process, Allianz selected the open source Alfresco ECM with support from local IT consultancy Lateral Minds.
“Our key criteria were cost, agility, capability, technology fit, integration options, and functionality, Rynne said. “The factors that helped Alfresco were the presence of former Documentum people in the Alfresco team, the Alfresco community, the existence of the enterprise edition in addition to the community edition, and local support is available to us.”
As an insurance company, Rynne said whether software is open source is not something that drives IT as the organisation is “a bit conservative”, but there has been some momentum around open source which has “taken a different lifestyle in recent years”.
“There is more structure around it so we had to reassess some previously perceived risks around open source,” he said, adding Allainz had recently used open source software for a portal which allowed IT to “strike while the iron is hot”.
Since going live about 12 months ago Allianz now has almost one million documents stored in the ECM system for a total of 500GB of data.
“Now there is no need to copy documents around. We scanned a lot of documents and then put them in storage or burnt them,” Rynne said.
Documents for some business units – for example, original claim documents need to be retained for seven years after closure – had to be kept for compliance reasons, but now they are not taking up “a couple of hundred square metres of prime CBD office space”.
Source:
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/302835/allianz_removes_walls_paper_open_sour
Tim Rynne, office automation manager at Allianz Australia Insurance, said although it was identified as a business requirement 18 months ago, the organisation had held off deploying a content system because it could not find one suited to its needs.
“We moved into a `paperless office` with lots of paper,” Rynne said. “We had a lot of paper, people were working in a new building with stacks of paper around their desks. A lot of it was Post-It notes.”
Allianz Australia is a subsidiary of the global Allianz Group and has some two million local policy holders, more than 300 staff and runs its IT shop with a good level of autonomy.
“We had a number of projects with document management components, but it was implemented in a special way,” Rynne said. “We have Notes content, paper and the classic file directories and direct attached storage.”
As part of a number of projects around BPM, it needs ECM (enterprise content management) for functionality that is “more than just storage” and at the same time wanted to reduce emissions and viewed paper as “part of the problem”.
Moving to electronic processes would also allow Allianz to move or eliminate physically stored content which, in the case of CBD office space, could translate into a hard ROI for the ECM project.
After a three-month evaluation process, Allianz selected the open source Alfresco ECM with support from local IT consultancy Lateral Minds.
“Our key criteria were cost, agility, capability, technology fit, integration options, and functionality, Rynne said. “The factors that helped Alfresco were the presence of former Documentum people in the Alfresco team, the Alfresco community, the existence of the enterprise edition in addition to the community edition, and local support is available to us.”
As an insurance company, Rynne said whether software is open source is not something that drives IT as the organisation is “a bit conservative”, but there has been some momentum around open source which has “taken a different lifestyle in recent years”.
“There is more structure around it so we had to reassess some previously perceived risks around open source,” he said, adding Allainz had recently used open source software for a portal which allowed IT to “strike while the iron is hot”.
Since going live about 12 months ago Allianz now has almost one million documents stored in the ECM system for a total of 500GB of data.
“Now there is no need to copy documents around. We scanned a lot of documents and then put them in storage or burnt them,” Rynne said.
Documents for some business units – for example, original claim documents need to be retained for seven years after closure – had to be kept for compliance reasons, but now they are not taking up “a couple of hundred square metres of prime CBD office space”.
Source:
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/302835/allianz_removes_walls_paper_open_sour
