Timothee LEPOUTRE of IT-Room(www.itroom.fr), writes about his experiences in building the number one claim management platform in France using IBM Lotus Domino and DominoPDF. IT-Room is a partner in France.
SERI Experts is a leading French claim assessment and settlement company. Through its LossOnline platform, SERI ACCeL ENTREPRISES currently manages 23 damage and personal liability programmes. Clients include 19 corporations of the CAC40 (CAC40 is the French equivalent to Dow Jones, FTSE 100, etc). SERI manages several thousands of cases around the world every year.
Claims settlement process involves many parties, insurers, brokers, insured and loss adjusters. They all work independently but with a lot of information exchange between them. Consequently, document and information exchange is a complex process, as, traditionally, each document has to be faxed manually to all parties concerned. This has to be done for every element of the claim settlement.
SERI was looking for an automated Claims Settlement process to improve customer satisfaction and efficiency. LossOnline.com is the result of that search for excellence. To develop the LossOnline.com platform, SERI called on their software partner IT-Room, a system integrator that had already implemented a Domino-based system for claim management.
LossOnline simplifies online claim management by offering users a reference system that makes information access and distribution from a shared, central and secure database.
LossOnline implements a new model. Instead of dispatching the documents to all parties, the information is stored on a centralised and secured database on an Internet site that is available 24 hours a day. This greatly simplifies information access and distribution. No more faxing! More convenient than email communications, LossOnline allows each party to get to the required claim-related information whenever it is needed.
One of the main problems to solve for LossOnline was to completely avoid paper from the process. The damage assessment reports from the loss adjusters have to be properly dated, submitted and approved by the adjuster manager before being made available on the system. In the past, this involved creating PDF files ‘by hand’ and distributing them via Email.
The challenge was to eliminate the Email distribution by displaying the PDF version of loss adjuster’s reports in quasi real-time on the user screen. In technical terms, to avoid a system time-out by doing the conversion & display in less that ten seconds.
IT-Room roamed the Web for an appropriate solution and DominoPDF quickly emerged as the only company in the world able to meet all the requirements in terms of functionality, performance and security. DominoPDF was easily integrated into the LossOnline system and, after three weeks of tests, it became operational at the end of June 2006.
About the Author
Timothee LEPOUTRE is a graduate from ENIC (Ecole Nouvelle d’Ingenieur en technologie de l’information et de la Communication) and joint managing director of IT-Room (www.itroom.fr), a software company founded in April 2000 to focus on information systems, process management and data storage. A Certified Lotus Professional since 2002, IT-Room has been exclusively using Lotus Notes Domino as basis for document management systems and websites such as LossOnline.com.