Illinois-based insurance brokerage and risk management services company Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. has improved efficiency, customer services, and record keeping for business recovery purposes through the installation of a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007-based document management system for its risk management services division.
    
The risk division, called Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services, or AJGRMS, generates an estimated 11 million documents a year in the form of proposals, quotes, and policies, as well as informal documents, such as e-mail messages and other correspondence. The company is likely to have as many as 180 million documents –
totaling approximately 1.4 billion pages – by 2015. Prior to the start of this project, the company’s 50 plus offices had varied methods of document management ranging from using software packages that were part of the division’s four agency management systems, to using third-party software. In many cases paper copies were kept in file folders.
    
“The result was an awful lot of paper that was cumbersome to work with and expensive to store,” says Todd Kimble, chief information officer for AJGRMS.
    
Two new initiatives – a company-wide process improvement effort, and a division-wide initiative that involved practice groups providing products and services specific to business segments – both would require that documents be available any time from any location.
    
AJGRMS worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner PointBridge to develop a customized SharePoint-based document management system. The SharePoint system was chosen because of its ability to integrate tightly with the company’s existing environment, and because of its customizability, according to Kimble.
    
“We were far more comfortable with our ability to cost-effectively customize SharePoint Server 2007, without having to pay for the special resources that would have been required with a different system,” he says.
    
After successfully rolling out the system to one branch, the company is in the process of rolling it out to the rest of the branches in the division over the course of this year.
    
The tight integration between SharePoint and other Microsoft Office programs is one early benefit in productivity.
    
“Most of our employees spend the majority of their time working not in the agency management systems, but in the Microsoft Office suite,” Kimble says, noting that now they won’t have to bounce from application to application.

AJGRMS is able to decrease filing and search time with the intuitive search, version-control, and repository features in SharePoint Server 2007. This, combined with the ability to share information across dispersed offices, is expected to boost customer service.

“With all insurance documents, notes, and customer correspondence at our fingertips, we’ll be able to deliver higher-quality service to our customers and carriers alike,” says Doug Frost, director of business applications for AJGRMS.

SharePoint’s redundant backups of electronic documents, and its hierarchical storage management for moving documents to less expensive storage as they age will help the company with records retention and business continuity.

These changes represent a big change from previous processes.
“Records management used to mean physically moving paper from file cabinets to office file rooms, then to offsite storage. Retrieval of a single offsite file meant recalling the entire box in which it was stored,” Frost recalls.