We just started. We went live four months ago. We are really not using any advanced features of Datacap. Nonetheless, in terms of benefits, we definitely see better monitoring and better recording of statistics. Now, we can better manage our processes. Initially, with older captures, the reporting was a pain, but now we have very good reporting; that's one advantage. The second advantage is in terms of performance. We have some very good performance; no complaints at all in terms of performance. We are doing OCR-ing and high-speed indexing. We have considerably large volumes and Datacap is handling it pretty well.

It is mostly the management of the unstructured content, and defined automated work flows to streamline the processes; those kinds of things.

I'm still a little new to this organization, but I think forcing users to use some sort of taxonomy, having users understand their data better, so they can classify it and retrieve it has improved this organization. The old way would be storing documents in a file system, in folders, and that's just chaos. It’s probably a little generic, but the big driver is having more control over that data.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions. I think we have resource constraints. We have some people that might be retiring, so I'm looking toward augmenting our team in whatever ways we can, including cloud, hybrid cloud, and so on.

We're still working on providing analytics and reporting services for my organization. Reporting is one of the areas that we've fallen a little bit behind in ECM. We're just not there yet, but we're definitely looking at that.

We're now able to provide better content management services than had existed before.

I think a lot of the internal and external customer experiences have gotten better, just at a high level, due to our implementation of FileNet, going from a bunch of weird VB6 and PowerBuilder client server apps to something that is distributed computing and can scale out, scale up, etc.

I think performance has improved, and then also that relates to supportability. If you have a bunch of client server apps, you have a lot of people that need to work on a desktop team to support them. I think there's some value there.

I think we're looking at including mobile. I honestly don't know the business side a whole lot. I'm more involved with the infrastructure, but I know we're looking at mobile. We've played around with ICN Mobile. I know we'll probably be doing Datacap at some point.

Most bigger projects with over 50 million documents use IBM ECM. We have more than 16 such projects in Saudi Arabia.

It can store a large amount of content and make it accessible both through APIs and the out-of-box UI. This allows us to segregate content into different repositories, but then provide enterprise access restrictions based on line of business, or roles, or other criteria. This is probably the biggest benefit.

We're in the proof of concept stage right now. We haven't rolled it out yet. I think it's premature to make any remarks about organizational improvements.

It provides a very simplified process. It's a lot more flexible than the system we had before. It allows us, again, to create those business processes on the platforms that more closely represent the actual business processes. It's got a lot of capabilities to be extended. We've glued into our infrastructure. Our ecosystem can talk to many other systems. A lot of things that had been manual in the past are now automated.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions.

We haven't yet leveraged any new analytics or content management services. Because I went to a recent World of Watson conference, my eyes were opened to a whole lot of content analytics that we wanted to do as soon as I got back.

There are probably a lot of operational efficiencies, as I’ve mentioned. I think it's going to make us more acquisition ready. We'll be able to hide a lot of complexity as we acquire new systems. We can glue them into the ECM platform very, very easily; keep a very standardized process across business units. That'll help us acquire companies much more rapidly and, more importantly, absorb them into Western and Southern.

We have plans to eventually include mobile as well, in a couple of different ways: our interaction with our end customers, our policyholders, our contract holders, probably some exchange of information with agents. I don't know, yet, how we're going to fully roll that out.

We've had Datacap in place about eighteen months. It's been very successful in the business unit that's using that. We're still working on the Case Manager piece. The first workflow should go live after the first of the year. We expect a very similar experience with our customers there.

It's made the management of document images much easier. We're using a product like Content Manager instead of managing ourselves millions of files, whatever that entails; moving them around, figuring out file names, allocating storage, assigning indexes so that we can search for documents easily in terms of document types, whatever is contained in a document or whatever we can think of to tag documents. For example, this is a form, this is a loan document, this is a proof of income document. Using Content Manager, we're able to classify documents with attributes like that.

It's given us compliance. It's given us the ability to go to cloud or to stay on-prem. It's at the forefront of technology. It always has new products that come out that give us new functionality, which give us new business capabilities. It's reliable. Sometimes you deal with smaller companies and they don't have the support, but IBM has fantastic support. They've supported us over the years. We use AVP and they've been fantastic. It's a reliable solution.

It has allowed us to take all of our faxes and put them directly into our systems versus having to print them off first and then scan them in. It's greatly sped up our front-end processing. It's made us a lot more efficient.

We are not considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or box solutions, at this time, although we are starting to look at it. We don't have the latest and greatest Datacap. We're hoping to be able to see some of those on the cloud, and be able to say, "Oh yeah. That's what we need," and then work, kind of as another extension of our systems. We have a test system, a QA system and a production system, and we would like to be able to see a system with the latest and greatest of Datacap and then ask, can we use it?

There are definitely new analytics services that we're able to provide to your organization now. We’re now able to see our documents going through, the process, how fast they’re going through. Some of our documents are time-based, so we're able to say, "Yup, they made it through the system in this amount of time."

Some of our SLAs on our documents have been greatly improved. We're able to show and prove that our SLAs are working and that we're getting our documents in on specific times.

The documents we're putting through the system has greatly increased. Our internal and external customers are using Datacap in a totally different way. Their jobs have changed tremendously because in the past they were doing a lot more indexing and so on, and now they don't have to.

We do not have plans to include mobile, at this time.

It has helped business areas to centralize storage,usage,search,dispositon of digital content and assets from multiple sources without a lot of training and helped IT to consolidate multiple vendor tools without a lot of customization but certainly with some tweaking-multiple upgrades with assistance from IBM . Our future plans for ECM users is to allow them digitize,store and collaborate easily on one platform.

It's an archive for reports. We can access our reports immediately after they're run. We went paperless; you don't have to print then, but you can print a page or pages as needed.

We spend less time at filing cabinets. We spend less time searching for documents, wondering what the status of something is because it is on someone's desk or they are out of the office. Who knows where it is? We are looking for it in an in-basket, in their mailbox.

Everything is digitized, everything is online, it is accessible and you can get it immediately. It's just a time saver, which saves money.

We have considered IBM on cloud, hybrid, or box solutions, and we've implemented that because of some governance requirements that we have to keep certain documents on the premises of the country in which we are doing business. It has to be physically stored there. So, we do cloud, where those servers are hosted in that country. We are doing that.

There are absolutely new analytics services that we provide for your organization. Now that you have that data, especially for business processes, when does the document get submitted? How many times it was touched? Who touched it, where were the delays? Where were the bottlenecks? We can really find efficiencies in our processes, and make a difference in being more efficient.

We are able to provide all of the above existing services better than we had been able to before. One thing that really works well is self service. It seems like we are constantly generating new content, constantly developing new processes, where someone can launch a workflow or ingest a different or new type of document and bring that up to speed very, very quickly with the proper security, with the proper retention and those legal requirements. It's done very efficiently, and we can get the analytics on top of that, to say, what is going on with these documents? Where are they going? Who is touching them, the audit log, and so on.

We have included mobile with the Case Manager Mobile App. People are very, very busy. They are on the go. They are always in meetings. They are not at their desktops anymore. To have that data at their fingertips on their device of choice, where they are going lean, more lightweight, with a tablet or with a phone, not carrying a laptop around. You have to have an app that will search, find and deliver that content wherever they are.

It has definitely improved the way our organization functions. It has made a lot of our in-person interactions with paper a lot more seemless; we don't have to have as many touch-points. It has improved the electronic routing of information.

We found that this solution was very easy to use for our customers. So, the interface of this solution was the best one for us.

The content management is all about you as you can make the same content for minimal purpose solutions applications.