Hastings Mutual Insurance Company is a U.S. Midwest regional property and casualty company located in Hastings, Michigan. Using its current Solimar solution, it has cut its development costs by over $30,000 per year, according to Michael Schaper, Director of Application Development. Here’s the scenario: Hastings Mutual must develop and distribute several different types of documents – including contracts/policies, correspondence/letters, internal reports, bills/invoices, statements and more. Each document type has its own requirements and production challenges. Hastings Mutual identified four objectives to improve its document communications workflows. The company needed:
- A system that’s easy to configure and maintain.
- Scalability to enable future growth and expansion.
- Ability to combine all print streams, including legacy and new, to achieve maximum postal efficiencies and discounts.
- Integrate with USPS presort applications to enable householding, size segmentation and inserter barcodes.
“In selecting the Solimar system, Hastings Mutual sought a solution that was more flexible, easier and less costly to maintain,” Schaper added. Hastings Mutual researched options to help better drive and manage its document production workflows and eventually selected the Solimar Chemistry Platform. The solution’s components include Solimar Print Director Enterprise (SPDE), Rubika, SOLindexer and SOLfusion. “Through the use of the Solimar SPDE product, we’re now able to receive print streams from both the mainframe and network-based systems and convert them into PDFs. The SOLfusion, SOLindexer and Rubika products allow us to perform householding, segmentation by document size, import/export/sorting capabilities with USPS presort applications, and the application of USPS and inserter barcodes. The Solimar system we configured was the best software solution for our environment. What really sold us was that the overall solution cost was very fair compared to others – and the ability to plug in other modules as we grow was important.”
SPDE, coupled with Rubika and SOLfusion, gives Hastings Mutual a solution that provides several ways to streamline workflows through automation. Rubika is a post-composition document re-engineering solution designed to automate manual processes, maximize postal savings, and enhance print data. Unlike other solutions which rely on custom programming, Rubika requires minimal coding at the application level and provides an intuitive user interface to rapidly implement production changes. Depending on the project at hand, the company is now 3 times to 10 times more productive. Schaper added: “The output designated for postal processing is indexed, linked together, householded, segmented by document size, exported to a third-party postal presort application, then imported back into the Solimar solution to sort the documents and apply the USPS IMB and inserter barcodes. The data stream is then converted to PostScript where the operator uses the SPDE Queue Manager to select the optimum printer for the job.” Hastings Mutual also discovered that Rubika may be used to solve a variety of challenges and can be configured in many different ways to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and boost profitability. As mentioned earlier, a measureable system benefit that Hastings Mutual discovered, was a cut in development costs by over $30,000 per year.
