Suncorp EasyDoc Project – Case Study

Suncorp is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest diversified financial services provider, supplying banking, insurance and wealth management products to around 7 million customers through well-established and recognised brands such as AAMI, Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency, Shannons, Vero, Asteron, Tyndall, Suncorp and GIO. Today Suncorp is Australia's sixth largest bank and second largest domestic general insurance group, with over 16,000 staff. Suncorp has representation in 450 offices, branches and agencies throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Mergers and acquisitions

Suncorp has developed in the way many large financial organisations have – through a combination of strong organic growth, coupled with a series of mergers and acquisitions. The result has been the introduction or development of many different document generation systems within the company, which has the potential to reduce business efficiency and the effectiveness of customer communications.

To address this challenge, Suncorp identified the need to reduce the number of document generation systems and develop a standard system for all applications and output channels. In looking for an overall solution, they required the ability to annually print an estimated 40 million documents both internally and via external mail houses. Their solution would also need to address short term business issues as well as longer term strategic objectives.

A jumble of documents

“We work with numerous outside vendors in our document generation business and each of these vendors has their own system for generating documents. For this reason we focused on open standards to guarantee interoperability,” said Dalton Cranston, solutions architect at Suncorp and one of the leaders on the implementation project. “This would not only prevent us from vendor lock-in, but would also guarantee us a future-proof solution. We evaluated all the main vendors, but their systems were too closed. Scriptura offered the most standards-based solution.”

With input coming from thousands of end-users both inside and outside the company, the chosen system had to be flexible enough to handle both numerous templates and differing demands of the main lines of business. Hence, Suncorp insisted on modular design. “Suncorp’s structure as a banking, insurance, and financial services company means that the organisation needed to develop an application that would manage all of its disparate demands”, Cranston says. “We are not changing the system so that one group does everything. We have had to build a system that can support many groups doing their own templates.”

A team of Suncorp employees, working closely with the Inventive Designers team, came up with a modular system that allows any authorised employee, at any Suncorp location, to submit documents for printing, faxing or electronic distribution. Furthermore, it provides customisation to the level that both the origin and content of a document can dictate the template used and the subsequent formatting of the information.

Improved efficiency

One of the advantages of a single system is the economies of scale that can be achieved. It allows document generation to be managed and viewed as a whole for the organisation, rather than looking individually at all of the pre-existing systems. For this reason, Scriptura was chosen as it would provide a single solution for both batch and online document generation at Suncorp.

“The intent”, Cranston says, “was to put user-friendly tools into the hands of end-users, business lines and branch offices, and to create customised documents based on individual needs. In many of the embedded systems, in order to change the company logo or a line of text, you had to go through significant IT involvement and effort,” Cranston comments. “One of the key tenets here was to give the business rules to end-users so they could change the logo themselves or change the way the information appears on the form.”

Cranston says this simple change has already improved efficiency. First, he says, users no longer have to wait for IT to perform simple changes, allowing them to instead concentrate on the bigger picture.

Cost reduction and reduced time-to-market

Cranston cites several advantages: “Business ownership of template maintenance has worked well. End-users were involved in the early stages to help design the system. This reduced the level of frustration and gave them control over their own document generation and output needs.” Cranston adds, “Template deployment times have dropped drastically. On top of this, new ideas and enhancements can be prototyped much more quickly if you come up with a new idea, you can try it out and see how it works.”

“Reduced overhead of support and maintenance is another advantage. The company can now focus on one system as opposed to the multiple document systems it had before. One system also means that the sharing of information across Suncorp is more efficient and our enhanced ability to electronically distribute documents has already saved printing and mailing costs. Electronic distribution also improves customer service because waiting times for document generation have been reduced,” Cranston explains.

Future-proof

According to Cranston, the system implemented many measures to guard against future requirements and business technology needs, “Because Scriptura is completely based on open standards, full compatibility and seamless integration with existing legacy applications, our future software investments are guaranteed. Scriptura is a vendor-neutral business output solution that will always be usable, regardless of the technologies Suncorp adopts in the future.”

The system has been rolled out to all branches and offices and includes batch and individual print functionality as well as print, fax, and online document transfer.

The Role of Software Projects

Software Projects has been a major contributor to the project from its inception and continues to provide the following services:

• Solution Architecture consultancy;
• Development resourcing;
• Templater Training; and
• Templating Services.