Category: Cases

15.08.2024

Nobly Consent Streamlines Consent Management at Alka Insurance

Nobly and Alka Insurance have jointly set the standard for a more modern, structured, and compliant approach to consent management in the insurance industry. Through the development of the Nobly Consent product, not only have Alka's internal processes been improved, but customer experience and data security have also been significantly strengthened. Together, we have created a generic product that can streamline consent management as an integrated part of the customer journey in the insurance industry.

Alka and Nobly have collaborated for several years on the digitalization of Alka’s processes. The collaboration fundamentally involves OnBase as a document archive, along with a range of solutions that enhance Alka’s customer experience and compliance. The use of OnBase as a document archive at Alka has created a strong platform for further development and optimization. According to Rasmus Lundvig Hansen, IT Manager at Alka Insurance, it is: “A central part of running an insurance company and serving our customers, which OnBase and Nobly fulfill in our business.”

Read more about the Alka and Nobly partnership here

Growing Need for Secure Consent Management

In an industry characterized by complex legislation and stringent consent management requirements, many companies face significant challenges. To ensure compliance with regulations, the Financial Supervisory Authority imposes hefty fines for GDPR and Data Protection Act violations, which regulate consent management. Especially in the insurance industry, there are high documentation requirements for compliance. Many companies start with manual methods to handle consent. However, it quickly becomes apparent that this approach is unsustainable in the long run, as it makes it harder to comply with the law. It also results in a manual and unstructured process that becomes inefficient due to the many involved parties.

Due to a general need in the industry and demand from Alka, Nobly, in collaboration with Alka, developed the Nobly Consent product. Before implementing our solution, Alka faced challenges that many in the industry can recognize. Rasmus Lundvig Hansen elaborates on the need for a consent management product: “The need on our side has really been there for many years. Essentially, it is about keeping track of our consents and being able to document the consents or choices the customer has made. The reason it has now resulted in us wanting a separate system is that we have reached a point where it makes sense to consolidate them in a central place.”

From Alka’s side, there was also a strong desire to optimize the customer journey by making the consent system transparent for Alka’s customers, so it is easy to have an overview of the consents given and the ability to change consents online. Rasmus Lundvig Hansen says:

“Generally, it is just good customer care to be able to show customers that we have control over their consents – and to have it centralized in one place, where it can also be accessed internally by an advisor or similar.”

Nobly Consent

Nobly Consent is developed to ensure that companies in banking, finance, pension, or insurance are compliant with the current legislation on collecting consents. The product makes it easy to obtain necessary consents as an integrated part of the sales process. It makes compliance easier and ensures digital consent management.

The solution is specifically aimed at the industry, as there are many similarities between the challenges companies in the industry face daily. With Nobly Consent, consent management becomes an integrated part of your company’s customer journey. The product contributes to more manageable administration, easier renewal of consents, and integration with multiple consent systems.

The integration of consent management was a crucial point for Alka in their desire for a new consent system: “We are trying to be proactive with a really good overall structure on it. Today, we have to do it from different systems. We will avoid this in the future, so in that way, it is crucial for us to optimize efficiency in our insurance business by centralizing consent management.” says Rasmus Lundvig Hansen.

Read more about Nobly Consent

Collaboration and Innovation – The Path to Nobly Consent

The collaboration between Nobly and Alka on developing Nobly Consent has been a positive experience all around. From the beginning, there was a clear understanding of both parties’ expectations for the process and the product. From Alka’s perspective, the process presented by Nobly was initially longer than their internal development process, but Rasmus Lundvig Hansen states: “When you have this partnership across companies, it has turned out that the process has been really fine.”

From Nobly’s side, there is also great enthusiasm for the collaboration and development process:

“We are proud to deliver a solution that makes a difference in Alka’s daily work with consent management and compliance. Moreover, we are pleased that we have developed a product that can benefit the insurance and pension industry by making consent management more integrated and compliant.” – Morten Have, CEO of Nobly.

To ensure alignment and understanding of what the product should include, Alka and Nobly have held several workshops together. The main focus throughout the process has been to develop a generic product that, of course, meets Alka’s needs but can also solve consent management issues for others in the industry.

Through this collaboration, Nobly has improved Alka’s consent management, digitized the process, ensured compliance, and created a structured and efficient approach. This is important for Alka:

“Having control over consents as a financial company is a license to operate. In this way, Nobly Consent will become one of the cornerstones for Alka in the future to be able to sell and handle customers’ insurance. ”

Rasmus Lundvig Hansen continues: “By having all consents centrally located, our insurance system and website can integrate with Nobly Consent to create, update, or get information about the consents the customer has given and then handle the customer’s request, whether it is purchasing insurance or in connection with a claim.”

This collaboration has been successful not only due to the final product but also because of the good communication and strong partnership we had along the way. Morten Have states: “The collaboration with Alka on developing Nobly Consent has been extremely positive. We look forward to continuing our good partnership and supporting Alka on their digital journey. The need for an integrated consent system is something we see across the industry, and we are therefore pleased to offer a product that benefits more than just the individual customer.”

Consent in the Insurance Industry

The fact that Nobly Consent was developed in collaboration with a customer in the insurance industry confirms that our product meets the industry’s expectations and requirements for consent management. This development partnership with Alka shows that our product is a practical and effective way to address a problem in the industry. Ultimately, it is about taking a step toward a more modern, structured, and compliant approach to consent management.

Contact us for more information about Nobly Consent and how we can help your business:

CONTACT INFO

Morten Have
CEO Nobly
mh@nobly.dk
+45 27 51 30 00

“Having control over consents as a financial company is a license to operate. In this way, Nobly Consent will become one of the cornerstones for Alka in the future to be able to sell and handle customers’ insurance. "

Rasmus Lundvig Hansen

IT Manager at Alka Insurance

Digital archive solution streamlines the workflow at Velliv

With Nobly's implementation of OnBase, the pension company Velliv has centralized several million documents in a digital archive, which simplifies the workflow and provides large financial savings.

In the past, the pension company Velliv had both physical and several digital archives located in different places. They therefore had a need to gather the document archives in the same place, and in the beginning of 2021, Velliv decided to purchase a new digital archive system, which centralizes all the company’s digital documents. The ECM system OnBase with Nobly as supplier and implementation partner was selected by Velliv among eight potential IT suppliers.

“The solution in OnBase best supports our needs, because the system has a number of functions that we experienced are better than what other suppliers on the market can offer,” says Peter Thomsen, department director in Customer Service at Velliv.

The previously slow and resource-heavy processes of manual, print and scanning have now been replaced by the digital archive in OnBase. Velliv also saves printing several million pieces of paper a year, which is both an economic and not least environmental benefit of the transition to the new digital archive solution.

Once digital, always digital

Since the implementation of OnBase, Velliv has migrated 16 million documents, and the company is now working on migrating an additional 8.5 million. documents. The digital archive solution in OnBase means that the company’s employees only have to look in one place when they need to find relevant customer information within a short time.

“Our workflow has been greatly eased compared to what we were used to. We no longer print and scan documents. The strategy we follow is once digital, always digital. This means that everything can be found much faster when we have finished migrating our existing archives, ” says Peter Thomsen.

As a pension company, Velliv handles a lot of sensitive information about their customers, and OnBase is precisely geared to handle GDPR. Velliv also has a great need to be able to control who has access to various documents, and that function was therefore configured in OnBase.

“It has been important for us that we could see the potential in the system in several areas. Nobly comes with a really good product in OnBase, because it is easy to integrate and configure,” says Peter Thomsen.

With OnBase, Velliv has accessed a system that meets the company’s existing and future needs in their overall digitalization strategy, and according to Peter Thomsen, Velliv is therefore already looking into other areas where OnBase can be used.

AL Finans chose Nobly and OnBase as IT foundations

As a financing partner within private- and business leasing, factoring and loan financing, AL Finans is subject to strict legal requirements by the authorities.

In order to comply with current legislation and to comply with new legal requirements, AL Finans has chosen the future-proof IT platform OnBase as part of the foundation for the company’s digital workflows, risk classification and document management. Nobly has been responsible for the implementation of OnBase, which has resulted in short response times, releasing of significant personnel resources and strengthened risk classification.

AL Finans operates in a high-transaction environment, where safe and efficient case processing alongside fast response times are crucial for their competitiveness. The decision to step on the digitalisation accelerator resulted in a strong collaboration with the consulting house Nobly in autmn 2020.

“Our approach from the start was a desire for a modern AML system, i.e. an anti-money laundering system. We needed a fine-grained and consistent screening in our onboarding process and our due diligence, ranging from PEP screening and sanction screening of customers and real business owners, to screening terrorist lists, etc. All in order to automatically identify risk classifications and comply with legislation, which is continuously updated. We had a look at different systems that specialized in AML, but our choice quickly fell on OnBase. As a platform, OnBase provides us with a well-oiled engine for handling AML, but is also an integration platform that is integrated with our customer systems. At the same time, OnBase also knew a lot of other things that opened up some new opportunities for us as a business. Therefore, the decision was reasonably easy for us with the many future possibilities for automation,” says Johan Ploug Aagaard, Deputy Director at AL Finans.

The flexibility of OnBase stood the test shortly after the first part of the implementation, with new, stricter legal requirements for reporting citizenship. The addition to the existing risk classification was easy and smooth, as were the other layers of functionality that have subsequently been added to the system.

Saves 2300 hours on manual entries

Risk assessments were previously done manually in Excel, which was a very resource-intensive process. Today, all work processes are digital and automatic when AL Finans receives a loan application. The tailor-made OnBase solution looks up relevant databases, after which a risk classification is automatically produced. Meanwhile, employees can focus their time on more value-creating and customer-focused activities.

The entire optimized process flow has been created in close collaboration between AL Finans and Nobly, and has resulted in considerable time savings:

“If the number of applications that came through in 2020 is our starting point, then we can look forward to saving at least 2300 man-hours per year, only in this first phase of our digitalisation journey with Nobly and OnBase. But one thing is to have saved hours, another thing is that we have achieved uniformity and a higher quality in this work, precisely because it has been digitized. Users are appreciate because they do not have to spend time on manual entries and a lot of manual lookups, but instead can spend time in dialogue and in advising customers. The sooner we can return with an answer, the better – it gives us satisfied customers and of course also competitive advantages. We have become more efficient and can simply run more cases through per. employee, and we can therefore grow the business further with the same number of employees as we have today,” as stated by Johan Ploug Aagaard.

A supplier with industry insight

As Europe’s leading OnBase consulting house, Nobly specializes in business-critical IT solutions for industries including banking, finance and insurance. A position that weighed heavily when AL Finans had to find its future partner.

“Nobly won our trust primarily from their great insight in the industry we are part of, and by virtue of their competencies in the AML area in particular. It is a field that is constantly evolving in our industry, and which can challenge us to execute new legislation quickly. The easier and simpler we can implement regulations, the smoother and faster we are able to service our customers – which is crucial in our industry. This understanding brought Nobly into the collaboration from the start. It was reassuring to sit with a supplier who had insight in both the industry and the requirements we had to live up to, ”explains Johan Ploug Aagaard.

OnBase as a catalyst for digitization

AL Finans has high ambitions for the continued digitalisation of the business, where OnBase will be a central solution.

“Our entire customer archive must be located in OnBase, to provide a 360° customer overview of all relationships, leasing and loan contracts, signed documents, etc. In future projects, we must also build more ongoing due diligence into our risk classifications. When we can continuously screen our customers on various critical parameters, then we also know what risk we are looking into. At the moment, we make risk classifications in connection with the actual onboarding, but we want to make it more dynamic in the upcoming projects, so that the process runs continuously through our entire portfolio. This will mean that we get the right customers on the books over time, and always have our finger on the pulse of the portfolio. OnBase is an important part of our future hedging and growth engine,”concludes Johan Ploug Aagaard.

New document management system brings Alka to the forefront of customer experience and data security

In May 2018, the new Personal Data Regulation came into force, with strict requirements for the storage and use of sensitive personal information.

For Alka Forsikring, it was an opportunity to look through all business procedures and processes to, among other things, ensure the best possible control over the handling of sensitive personal information. Nobly offered Alka a solution for all documents; A document portal based on OnBase by Hyland. My Alka today offers the individual customer a secure overview of engagement and case correspondence, and Alka is thus well equipped for the digital race of the future.

“Despite ongoing digitalisation, about two years ago we still had about 2 km of shelves with physical damage cases. We had a meeting with Iron Mountain about a scanning solution with physical storage of all these cases, and at the meeting we were introduced to Nobly, their partner. Earlier, the new Personal Data Regulation (GDPR) was announced, which meant that we had to have a completely new document management system to ensure compliance with the new rules, including in the correspondence with our customers. Ordinary letter mail and eBoks are expensive alternatives, and in our experience do not provide the best customer experience. Instead, we chose to work with a centralized document archive as a base, som the customers can see everything at Mit Alka”, states the Area-leader from Alka Forsikring.

An intuitive and future-proof solution

Alka has a tradition of being very strong when it comes to satisfied customers. Customer experience and good service are high priorities, and were also an important starting point for the solution that Alka wanted. From the outset, the scope was limited to an intuitive document management solution, which initially included TIA documents, ie correspondence from Alka to the customer about current insurance cases.

“We had two basic requirements for the solution: The first was the requirement for a central archive in Mit Alka, where the customer can log in and see commitment and case correspondence from TIA. The second was the requirement for central logging of documents prescribed by the GDPR. After a thorough bidding and information process as well as subsequent analysis of suppliers, the choice fell on Nobly and OnBase, “says Product Owner Jesper Kiel Sloth and continues:” At that time we only had about two months left to implement the solution, which honestly looked unmanageable. But Nobly offered a proven and future-proof solution, and the chemistry was good at the meetings. ”

“Nobly is a relatively small consulting house, but with large customers within public regions, among other places, so we had confidence that they could handle the task. They demonstrated early in the process that they understood our needs and business practices. Their in-depth knowledge of document management, combined with the willingness to work very flexible in an agile form in which we operate, was what brought us to our goals on time. ”

The scope grew along the way

The initial discovery phase was crucial for the solution, says project manager at Alka, Stine Kensø: “We had many small and efficient work meetings around the entire business. Nobly was physically present and got to know all the corners of our business and they managed to ask a lot of questions in relation to our work processes. In previous supplier selection processes, I have experienced initially meeting a strong and convincing team, and later to discover discrepencies between what was promised vs. what was delivered. We certainly did not experience that this time. The schedule was tight, but we felt safe in choosing a future-proof system with many workflow options. ”

Jesper Kiel Sloth agrees: “Nobly’s approach to OnBase has throughout the process been that the system can solve our needs. Approximately 14 days into the implementation process, we had to acknowledge that we had to include archiving of email correspondence without attachments in the solution. It was not part of the original agreement. But a large part of our correspondence with customers takes place via emails without attachments, so it just made sense to include them as well. Here, Nobly proved to be super willing to change, and they made a good solution, where the system automatically asks whether emails out of the house should be sent normally or directly to My Alka. We actually solved a lot of extra GDPR-related requirements together with the first, narrow scope. ”

Morten Have is business development director and partner at Nobly and has been involved in the project from the start. He has only words of praise for the collaboration with Alka in a sometimes hectic process: “Alka has been extremely good to collaborate with. In IT, things are often decided at the management level. At Alka, it was the other way around. Here, users have driven the development, and have reacted quickly when something did not work in a practical setting. It has been incredibly strong. Alka was willing to make the necessary resources available and we did not have to wait for emails or meetings to move forward. We had a technical project manager sitting physically at Alka, which has been crucial for the process. Of course, it has also been of great importance that Alka chose a proven solution from the start, which included a wide range of OnBase modules that were easy to extend. Among other things, this was what made it possible to connect e-mail integration without the high costs, ”concludes Morten Have.

Ready employees and satisfied customers

12 superusers from different departments were the first to be trained in the new document management system. They acted as ambassadors in the departments, where OnBase has been well received by users.

“The system is very intuitive and easy, and users have been able to work with it from day one – even though all beginnings are difficult, and of course there were many questions in the beginning. The users have received the new document management system very well and more are already requesting access to more of the functions, ”says Stine Kensø.

At Alka, there is broad agreement that OnBase has been a good platform for their digital journey. From the outside, the insurance company is also often praised for their digital solutions, among others by FinansWatch. For many years, Alka has been one of Denmark’s fastest growing insurance companies with some of the market’s most satisfied customers, while Alka’s earnings have been on a par with the best on the market. A position that in December 2017 led to the company being acquired by Tryg, but continues as an independent brand.

“Insurance has a reputation for being boring and incomprehensible. Therefore, Alka’s goal is to make it simple and deliver good quality at a low price. OnBase gives us some efficient processes at low costs, which means that we can offer just that. Customers find it completely natural that they can find their policies, conditions and correspondence in My Alka, “says Jesper Kiel Sloth and concludes:” We live up to the personal data regulation, and we show relevant documents to relevant customers and employees. We are already looking forward to the next phase with OnBase, where we will be even sharper on digital processes and workflows. Among other things, we can see that both finance, HR and the entire business area can greatly benefit from OnBase. And we have yet to hear Nobly say, ‘We can not do that.’

OUH handles documents electronically with OnBase

With the help of electronic document management, Odense University Hospital (OUH) improves patient care by reducing waiting times, increasing employee satisfaction with immediate access to necessary documents, and reducing labor-intensive procedures in connection to compliance with medical records.

Odense University Hospital (OUH) is one of Denmark’s largest hospitals with 7,500 employees and more than 1,000 beds. The hospital treats 350,000 patients, 60,000 emergency room patients and 488,000 ambulant annually. Thus, care is provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With a record store that previously occupied 7 kilometers of physical space, OUH needed a solution for electronic document management that could reduce the costly storage of paper and support electronic patient records (EPR).

The requirements from OUH were therefore that electronic patient records and associated documents should be accessible immediately and securely via the Internet at all times of the day. The solution was to comply with national legislation regarding the storage of medical records and patients’ personal information. OUH wanted a solution for electronic document management that would enable easy integration with any EPR-system that might become necessary in the future.

Streamlining and saving space

With instant access to desired documents, and the reduction of labor-intensive procedures for complying with document management requirements, OUH is able to reduce patients’ waiting time and create space for private hospital visiting areas in rooms previously used for paper storage.

“With OnBase, access to documents is 64 times faster than with the paper version,” says section manager at OUH, Jette Kotsis, and adds: “Before OnBase, it took employees 7 minutes to retrieve the necessary documents, but with OnBase, the documents are retrieved in 7 seconds.”

By removing tasks that previously required a lot of paper and thus increased the consumption of time and finances associated with patient contact, including filling-out or manually retrieving paper documents, OUH has been able to move many secretaries from all departments to other necessary secretarial positions. In addition, storage space in hospitals is very costly, and therefore the abolition of 7-kilometer paper records a high value.

Unlike OUH’s previous document management system, which used client software for document search installed on all workstations, OnBase can be updated on the server instead of on the more than 2,000 IT workstations.

OnBase creates value for multiple departments

In Odense, OnBase was chosen as a starting point due to the system’s possibilities for web-adapted document management, but the implementation has been expanded to also include additional administrative needs and requirements for record management at the hospital.

OnBase also handles other business processes at OUH, which include a workflow that aims to facilitate negotiations between unions and the hospital. In addition, a plan must deal with staffing and personnel issues. At the same time, the need for training of employees involved in the OnBase processes was minimal at OUH. “It is a very user-friendly system,” explains Jette Kotsis.

Digitization is the green choice

The implementation of OnBase and Cosmic (OUH’s EPR-system) supports environmentally friendly, “green” initiatives, as electronic documents reduce the costly importance of paper in document-based processes. Resources and costs associated with printing, storage, shipping and paper production are reduced through the use of electronic documents.

Future-proof solution

In the future, it is likely that a common solution will be introduced in the healthcare system that meets all requirements between all EHR systems in Scandinavia. It therefore requires all hospitals to keep their documents in electronic form. With OUH’s solution with Cosmic and OnBase, the hospital is at the forefront of preparing for any future requirements for national electronic patient records (EPR).

In order to comply with current national legislation regarding the storage of electronic documents, OUH uses OnBase CD Authoring to create a journal for data recovery in the event of an IT-system crash directly from the OnBase system.

Healthcare professionals from all over Europe come to Odense regularly to see the far-sighted processes at OUH, and many use the hospital’s successful methods as a model for ideas for future implementation with the aim of streamlining processes and improving patient care using a long-term EPR.

Jette Kostis emphasizes that “all hospitals should have a system like OnBase.”

Benefits of electronic document management with OnBase

  • Treatment of multiple patients without requiring additional staff or resources.
  • Better utilization of limited and expensive hospital space. The space that was previously used for storage will be converted into additional rooms with undisturbed patient care.
  • Authorized healthcare professionals can search required documents related to the patient’s electronic medical record 64 times faster than paper processes.
  • Employees can access information directly from Cosmic in just 7 seconds, which by comparison took more than 7 minutes before the implementation of OnBase.
  • Removal of paper-intensive searches and archiving, which increased the time and cost of patient contact, while allowing for the relocation of secretaries from all departments to other necessary secretarial positions.
  • Reduces costs and supports environmental initiatives by minimizing the paper production, printing, storage and shipping associated with paper-intensive, document-based processes.
  • Complies with national requirements for storage of documents with requirements for hospitals to keep records for 15 years.
  • Equip the organization to comply with forthcoming national EHR requirements.

Visma increases security and minimizes processing time with OnBase

As a provider of online invoicing- and debt-collection services, Visma Collectors AS receives large amounts of physical letter mail every day, which contains person sensitive data. This places great demands on the time-consuming handling of the documents. The implementation of OnBase has reduced the handling time per letter with 70% and has digitized the archiving process 100%.

Norwegian Visma Collectors AS provides invoicing- and debt-collection services to private and public companies. This means that large amounts of sensitive letter mail are received daily from customers, authorities, debitors, and creditors. Previously, 4-5 annual work units were spent on handling the received mail, which must legally be answered within 2 days of receipt. It could be a challenge to meet this deadline, just as mail could be lost or risk being freely presented to the individual caseworker. On this basis, the management decided to streamline and digitize the handling of the incoming mail.

“We wanted to outsource the process to an external partner, who had to ensure that safety, efficiency, and punctuality were top notch. We contacted Iron Mountain, who in collaboration with Nobly introduced us to the ECM-solution OnBase. It was the perfect solution from the start – a really good match”, says Thomas Skjørten, Head of Business Development at Visma Collectors AS.

An efficient and safe solution

Based on a thorough analysis of the internal business procedures, Nobly provided a tailor-made solution where Iron Mountain is responsible for scanning the mail directly to OnBase. In the individual letter, information such as reference, case and personal identity number is automatically identified, and the letter is categorized and archived correctly in the system.

In this way, the handling time has been reduced from 4-5 annual work units to approximately 2 annual work units at Visma.

“The solution has reduced the handling of physical mail by 100%, and reduced the processing time on the individual documents by an average of 70%. It is financially a big gain for us. All caseworkers can easily find documents, as everything is logically categorized and archived in OnBase. In the past, we could see that we did not respond in a timely manner to a document because it had not been registered in our system. Now we can fully comply with all our internal guidelines and legal requirements as no record is lost in this system. It is also a great benefit for us that OnBase is GDPR approved. We no longer have letters lying around with the individual caseworkers, as all physical mail is destroyed after scanning and archiving in OnBase. Here, the documents are also automatically deleted when the case has been processed. It has traditionally been a huge challenge, which has now been solved, ”says Thomas Skjørten.

Easy to customize

When several vital IT systems in an organization have to talk to each other, it is typically an expensive and time-consuming process that can end up providing rigid solutions. One of the great advantages of OnBase is that it does not affect the core system, but can be easily integrated and tailored to the needs of the individual company. As an IT-supplier, Nobly has been responsible for adapting to the current business processes as well as training select employees who have been driving the process.

“OnBase has been easy to adapt to our existing systems. We use, for example the Actic debt-collection system, where we previously had to spend 4-5 clicks on forwarding a document for legal processing. Nobly developed a “quick button” in OnBase, which forwards via 1 click. In general, it is my experience that OnBase is a very configurable solution where it is easy to add buttons. It saves us a lot of programming time,” states Thomas Skjørten.

Phase 1, which included the digitization of the incoming mail, is now so well established in the organization that Visma Collectors has now begun to look forward to the next phase:

“All our employees have received OnBase very well, which has become a natural part of the workday. It is the employees who are the driving force in the process, and they are happy to be able to work more efficiently with the cases. The employees are our most important ambassadors for our services, and they look forward to getting started with phase 2, which includes outbound communication. All the documents that we produce internally and send out must also be stored in OnBase in the long run to provide the optimal work flow. For example, customers must be able to sign documents digitally when they have received a notification that they are ready online. This in turn must help to ensure that sensitive personal data and case history are processed correctly and automatically deleted when the loan is paid off and the case is closed. It is my expectation that this integration will streamline treatment time by an additional 20%,” estimates Thomas Skjørten.

BMW Group Financial Services improves workflows and efficiency in contract processes

In the automotive industry, car dealers and customers need rapid access to finance. Financial lenders need to make the process of contracting as fast as possible and the financing easily accessible in order to maintain lifelong relationships with business partners and free up working-capital.

BMW Group Financial Services needed a high degree of coordination and streamlined workflows to effectively support car sales in more than 50 countries by speeding up the processing time for contract applications. That is why OnBase® from Hyland was chosen.

“We recognized that the fact that we work across many different countries and with three separate business lines, BMW Group Financial Services, Alphera Financial Services and Alphabet, meant that an improvement in workflows required a greater degree of automation of the contracting process, “says Stefan Karlsson, BMW manager of Business Development, Nordics.

In 2009, the head office of BMW Group Financial Services approved a budget for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) with two key conditions: the solution should be in one database and there should be a common supplier in all markets to minimize implementation time and facilitate collaboration across countries.

“We signed a contract with Hyland on OnBase in 2010 and a structured implementation plan was launched,” said Bert van den Berg, Process & Quality Manager, BMW Group Financial Services. In the period May to October 2011, the ECM solution was installed in five countries: the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and Norway.”

The difference :

Eliminates paper and manual work:

BMW Group Financial Services no longer spends time manually handling contracts or appendix. “When working with OnBase, all paper documents can be scanned automatically and sent to the appropriate department via a secure file transfer protocol (FTP),” says van den Berg.

Accelerates the process of entering a contract:

“Previously, it could take up to 10 days to process a completed contract package and even longer for incomplete packages,” says van den Berg. The OnBase solution reduced the processing time from day one. In July, the processing time for contracts was reduced to 5 days and in August to 3 days. In September, the processing time was down to just 2,5 days. Finished, incomplete and incorrect contract packages are now processed faster and more effectively.”

Automatically notifies about defective applications:

OnBase marks defective applications and sends an email to dealers, informing them of incorrect or missing data. This provides a more proactive workflow and makes it easier and faster for dealers to take action. “We have gone from a reactive to a proactive solution,” says van den Berg.

Allows for continuous improvements throughout the company:

“The next step for BMW Group Financial Services is to continue to increase coverage with OnBase by integrating the system with other business systems and increasing the utilization of the reporting service,” says Lars Karlsson.

Newsletter signup