Successes - First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association
Fraternal Benefit Society Uses Westbrook Fortis Document Management to Flourish in Its Second Century

Organization
With over 85,000 members, the First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association (FCSLA) is a fraternal benefit society that ranks among the top fraternal societies active in the United States today. Since its founding in 1892 in Cleveland, Ohio, FCSLA has grown to provide licensed financial products in 46 states. Membership and its benefits are available to men, women and children of Slav descent living in the United States. As FCSLA entered its second century of operation, changes in the association’s corporate structure allowed it to strengthen its competitive position in the fraternal insurance market. To support these changes, FCSLA invested in Fortis and other technological enhancements to gain operational efficiencies.

At FCSLA, the main business reason for implementing Fortis was simple: there was no back-up system for their paper documents. FCSLA needed a digital backup of their insurance applications and certificates and a way of efficiently retrieving the documents once they were archived. The organization also wanted to share information more effectively within the main office and with their branches.

Solution
FCSLA chose Fortis after assessing the price and functionality of several other solutions. “In researching the top recommended document management solutions, Fortis stood out as the most affordable yet most easily customizable,” says Andy Mason, President of Mason Works, technical consultant to FCSLA. “Fortis is based on an open architecture, which made it easy to integrate with other systems that FCSLA was already using. We were able to set up the indices and document types without restrictions.” Because Fortis works seamlessly with FCSLA’s line-of-business software, users required minimal training.

“Instead of looking in five or six different places, everything I want to know about an account is at my fingertips,” says FCSLA System Manager Paula Dalpiaz. “The system searches for all the documents related to that account,” she explains. “If there’s a question about a change we made, it’s easy to retrieve the document that authorized it. Fortis is great in any situation where you need a record of a chain of events.” Address changes, policy changes and member letters and requests as well as death claims and supporting documents, are being scanned into Fortis. All departments have their month-end and year-end reports imported into Fortis as well.

Fortis is especially useful for keeping track of high-volume transactions. “Customers have options about what to do with their dividends, and that’s something people change frequently. We scan the change request form into Fortis – and we don’t have to save and file the paper copy,” she says. “It’s the same with incoming and outgoing correspondence. Now people know that if they want the full picture of what is happening with an account, they have to go to Fortis.”

Results
Every member of FCSLA’s 30-person staff uses the document management system. Insurance applications and their supporting documents are keyed into an in-house policy management system, and the New Business and Annuities Departments scan these documents into Fortis. FCSLA staff no longer searches through the file cabinets to find a folder, find the document, call the member back, give them the information, then re-file the folder. Now representatives look up the policy in their policy management system, click on a button and find the information they need. When a statement is issued, the Billing Department scans in statements and the corresponding member payment checks.

All Accounts Payable checks are printed to a PDF format and issued to the creditor as paper checks. A utility converts the PDFs into Tiff image files and imports the files into Fortis. An automated process runs in the background to pick up the check numbers, member name, then indexes each check and populates the index fields in Fortis.

“Before implementing Fortis, we were using another software product that failed about 30% of the time. There were a lot of checks that never made it into the system,” Mason says. “We’ve processed more than 250,000 checks in the past year with Fortis with 100% accuracy -- not a single one of them did not import.”

Using Fortis makes many everyday tasks more efficient. “The annotation feature is very handy,” Dalpiaz says. “It’s not like putting a note in a file that someone may not read. I’m able to put the annotation where I know someone else who is referencing the file will be sure to see it.”

FCSLA estimates that there will be approximately 500,000 documents in the active member documents and archive files. The organization is in the ramping up process, and the staff scans in approximately 5,000 documents per month at an average of eight pages per document for a total of over 40,000 pages.

Fortis helps FCSLA meet the requirements of state regulations for disaster recovery and numerous compliance issues in the insurance industry. “Currently we are licensed in 46 states, and we’re working on becoming licensed in all 50,” Dalpiaz says. “This will mean that we will have additional regulatory requirements to meet, and Fortis will help with that.”

The organization is planning to expand their use of Fortis. The Treasury Department, which handles FCSLA’s investments, will begin scanning all their Electronic Funds Transfers and investment statements in the next few months. The insurance industry recommends that customers have a disaster recovery system in place.

“With Fortis our documents are secure. We’re able to track the life of a document and to audit it as well. We now have an electronic copy of the original document as well as a record of any changes that have been made,” Mason says. “Nothing gets lost, misplaced or misfiled.”

>>Click here for printable PDF