Standard Life, an asset management company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, provides life assurance and pensions, investment management, and healthcare insurance products worldwide. After becoming a publicly traded company in 2006, the Document Services division of its Corporate Services segment wanted to implement a more efficient workflow. Document Services is the main entry point for all paper correspondence from customers. The department annually receives two million mail items. The staff of 60 scanned ten million pages a year on top of manually sorting and distributing mail across 16 processing areas. Scanners and software differed between each area and the imaging systems’ limited functionality prevented the company from improving performance.

In response, Standard Life chose EMC Corporation’s Digital Office Solution, based on EMC Captiva InputAccel and EMC Captiva Dispatcher intelligent capture software. With EMC Captiva, Document Services captures 35,000 scanned images from up to 6,000 daily mail items. Images are automatically classified with the matching of key templates, phrases, full-text optical character recognition, and optical mark recognition. Indexing criteria is extracted and validated for accuracy and that data is then attached to document images, which are sent to the company’s workflow system. With the new solution, only two percent of scanned mail is not accepted and handled manually instead.

Implementing this digital mailroom allowed Document Services to automate 90 percent of its business processes. The new system influenced a 30 percent reduction in staffing requirements. In addition, savings of £10,000 in maintenance and capital costs resulted from standardizing on a single imaging and scanning infrastructure.