Automated Document Creation and Proposal Process at Federated Insurance

Federated Insurance used DocBridge® Impress to build their Marketing Proposal Generator consisting of existing Word templates perfectly suited to Federated’s standard proposals and campaigns. Once a Federated marketing sales team member selects a template, DocBridge® Impress collects and assembles the needed text, data, and images.

The company’s marketing and sales departments needed a way to generate real-time, personalized, and editable documents for sharing with actual and potential customers. They wanted to utilize existing Word templates containing necessary style information, fonts, colors, table styles, and similar, which they could customize to be highly specific to the customer. They also needed to be able to edit the documents once they were created.

Federated’s existing proposal generation process consisted of time-intensive, customer-facing presentations and proposals that were produced in-house and took the marketing department roughly 30 minutes each to prepare. The process wasn’t automated, there wasn’t an option to include personalized variable data, and the IT department spent about 10 hours per week on managing the process and responding to individual issues. On top of this slow and manual process, they used a legacy distribution strategy and delivery system. The company was generating hundreds of Word doc proposals per day but needed to be turning out thousands.

The solution: DocBridge® Impress

Federated Insurance used DocBridge® Impress to build their Marketing Proposal Generator consisting of existing Word templates perfectly suited to Federated’s standard proposals and campaigns. Once a Federated marketing sales team member selects a template, DocBridge® Impress collects and assembles the needed text, data, and images. If it’s a more complex form with dynamics such as logic or rules, it’s composed directly in Impress Designer. Other forms are composed right in Word using Impress.

The proposal process is integrated into web services and uses a combination of Word, XML, XSL and homegrown code. Word is transformed to XML to generate a document file. Impress adds variable data, creates a single HTML output file, and sends it to Word's APIs. The output is a single, professional Word or PDF document that goes to the potential or current client. When it’s returned to the marketing sales team, it can be further edited and personalized, if needed.

The results: Tremendous savings and increased revenue

Automating the proposal process returned 20% of time per year to Federated’s marketing department and allowed the company to eliminate its dependency on their IT department, resulting in annual operational savings of nearly $70,000 per year. Federated is also seeing decreased spending of nearly $100,000 per year by eliminating costly legacy applications.

On top of those savings, Federated’s production of proposals and marketing offers increased by 1,000 percent.

As a result of this automation, annual revenue expectations from these business units have increased sharply and are expected to increase profitability as they expand the solutions to other projects. Federated is happy with the results. “We have a very satisfied marketing force. They had wanted documents like this for a long time, and they had some solutions in place before, but they were a little clumsier and just didn't quite ring all the bells they needed to ring.”

“Compart’s solution has been great to work with. We’re especially happy with Compart’s ongoing dedication to using open standards, which has made it possible for us to completely integrate Impress into our existing system. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel because they're using common technologies like XML, XSL, and HTML, which we were already familiar with and already had a code base for. We’re looking forward to working with Impress on many more projects in the future.”