Liberty Mutual Insurance
Global insurer saves $21 million over five years with assistance from Hyland.
Liberty Mutual insures paperless future with Alfresco Content Services on AWS
Liberty Mutual Insurance formed its Global Specialty business unit in 2012 to drive growth in 18 markets worldwide. From the outset, the goal was to build a less paper-intensive business. "We wanted to create global productivity teams that could collaborate and leverage our scale in a digital manner," says the company's SVP & CIO of Global Specialty.
At the time, the organization had some tactical document management systems in place, but they were siloed and based on slow, outdated technology. What's more, files were stored in U.S. data centers, which further delayed content access by a globally dispersed user base.
Content management in the cloud
The SVP & CIO's vision was to deliver a modern, cloud-based solution that would enable paperless operations around the world. Says the SVP & CIO: "Our objective was to deliver global document management capabilities that would be effective locally, whether users were in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America or Latin America."
The team also viewed the initiative as an opportunity to simplify regulatory compliance and accelerate solution delivery with automated build and deployment.
Alfresco platform was the only ECM solution that absolutely met our requirement for cloud-native capabilities.
— SVP & CIO, Global Specialty.
Alfresco platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In 2015, Global Specialty went live with Alfresco Content Services and Alfresco Governance Services running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution provides electronic file and records management capabilities that integrate seamlessly with the company’s core insurance applications.
According to the SVP & CIO, Hyland's Alfresco platform was the only ECM solution that “absolutely met our requirement for cloud-native capabilities.” Other advantages included the platform’s small footprint, REST APIs and CMIS support, strong customer references, and an enterprise open source model that “ensures we’re getting the attention we need as a Fortune 75 company.”
“Absolutely a hit” with end users
Global Specialty has rolled out the Alfresco platform solution to underwriters and claims managers across multiple offices and product lines. The SVP & CIO calls user feedback “extremely positive.” Employees continue to use familiar front-end applications, while Alfresco works in the background—automating everything from document retrieval to records management.
The organization has set up AWS environments in Asia Pacific, Europe and the U.K., so international users can access and share documents more quickly. “The solution has removed every single one of our performance issues,” says the SVP & CIO. “Our underwriters and claims staff can focus on business problems and not worry about the technology.”
$21 million in savings
Alfresco Content Services has helped Global Specialty digitize its operations. The payoff is huge. The organization expects to save $21 million over five years thanks to a massive reduction in paper, printing and document storage costs.
The IT team worked closely with business users to build a solution “in which paper wasn’t part of the process,” says the SVP & CIO. A strong focus on user education and faster content access have changed the way people work. With information at their fingertips, users don’t feel compelled to print documents, and the company is shutting down its large file rooms.
“A lifesaver” for regulatory compliance
The SVP & CIO also highlights the benefits of using Alfresco Governance Services to streamline compliance with data privacy and retention regulations worldwide. Global Security can now consistently apply records management policies to a single source of truth hosted in a secure AWS environment. “As regulations like GDPR and others take effect, this has absolutely been a lifesaver for us,” she says.
The SVP & CIO advises companies adopting cloud-based content services to set aside time for internal education and alignment. Her staff had multiple meetings with data privacy and compliance teams to get them comfortable with the idea of having customer data in a production application in the cloud.
Deployment in 30 minutes
Global Specialty has leveraged Alfresco platform’s cloud-native capabilities to accelerate time to market and maximize the solution’s value enterprise-wide. The organization can deploy a fully functional Alfresco platform environment on AWS in just 30 minutes using Infrastructure as Code automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
“It just takes us minutes to build something that might have taken weeks, if not months,” says the SVP & CIO. “And we can reuse the deployment plans we’ve built to create new Alfresco environments in other parts of Global Specialty or across Liberty Mutual as a whole.”
300 million documents
After a successful three-year partnership, Alfresco (now Hyland) became Global Specialty’s ECM vendor of choice. The team will continue to extend Alfresco platform’s capabilities into other parts of their underwriting and claims management organizations. Longer-term plans include using the Alfresco platform to manage all business records.
Seeing the value Global Specialty has gained from cloud-based ECM, more Liberty Mutual businesses, including U.S. Consumer Markets and Commercial Insurance, have standardized on Alfresco platform. The SVP & CIO predicted that, by the end of 2018, Liberty Mutual will manage 300 million documents in Alfresco platform on AWS. “So that should address any questions about whether this is a scalable solution,” the exec says with a smile.