German insurance company automates email archiving for claims management

The client had previously either printed out and then scanned emails and their attachments worthy of archiving or processed them as faxes for archiving in TIFF format. However, the process did not guarantee that every email and every attachment found its way into the archive.

The new solution should enable claims handlers to induce the import process for personal email considered worthy of archiving, thereby triggering the archiving process. The challenge lay in developing an automated archiving process for the many millions of emails per year. The choice fell on the solution from PDF Tools AG due to the high throughput rate, stability and reliability of its 3-Heights® Document Converter Service.

The automated archiving process efficiently and reliably converts large quantities of emails and their attachments from OpenOffice and Microsoft Office product formats to a standardized PDF format. The index information is read out automatically in a standardized structure.

The emails to be archived are imported using Interact Consulting’s importer module and then converted to a standardized PDF format by the 3-Heights® Document Converter Service. Image formats are archived in TIFF format as before.

Metadata attributes are assigned to each email to enable case allocation. The data is then processed by the appropriate modules of Interact Consulting’s CaptureSuite software and exported to the archive using EMC Captiva InputAccel.

As a system integrator, Interact Consulting has developed and implemented solutions and services for the automated processing of unstructured information since 1991. The scope includes solutions for scanning and data input, document management and archiving, and portals for processing unstructured information in general such as email and other electronic objects. In 2009, the company was appointed by a large German insurance provider to automate the email archiving process for personal email belonging to its claims handlers.