MassPrinting & Municipal Mutual
Outsourced Printing Yields Immediate Cost Savings
MMIC needed to solve their paper problem.
Like many insurers, MMIC had a paper problem. “We printed everything,” Brian Taylor, MMIC’s president and CEO, commented. “We had warehouses rented around town just to store documents, including claims files going back to the 1930s.” They needed a new way to handle documents to reduce unnecessary costs, minimize business risk, increase efficiency, and eliminate redundant processes.
But they couldn't go completely paperless.
For most of their 100+ year history, they had been dependent on paper documents to run their business. Even in 2018, they still needed to think in paper to serve their customer base.
MMIC performed all of their printing and mailing through in-office printers. In the event of a software or printer failure, document processes came to a stand-still until the hardware or software was either repaired, updated, or re-programmed. They had had to hire new staff to handle all the paper and troubleshooting. All that paper also posed a disaster recovery problem. A natural disaster could wipe out their records.
Remote printing via API was the solution.
MMIC had already taken a major step toward fully digital operations by implementing the cloud-native BriteCore platform. They had already reaped major benefits in efficiency and effectiveness from its use, growing every year since beginning implementation in 2012. Now, as they sought to transform their document handling, MMIC decided to leverage BriteCore’s APIs to extend the platform’s capabilities beyond core, data, and digital components and connect to third-party vendor services.
MMIC selected MassPrinting due to their reputation for providing quality implementations, ability to integrate with APIs, and ongoing partnership with BriteCore––MMIC’s centralized platform for core, data, and digital solutions. MassPrinting is an established BriteCore partner and had integrated with BriteCore’s print API for other clients. Their excellent relationships with current BriteCore clients and success with early adopters such as Panhandle Mutual Insurance and Leatherstocking Cooperative Insurance gave MMIC confidence in MassPrinting’s ability to smoothly transition MMIC’s complicated paper-based systems to remote printing.
MassPrinting is also an active participant in BriteCore’s Community Source Code Development program, which grants MassPrinting’s engineers access to BriteCore’s source code repository and online developer community to facilitate integration and build capabilities that can be shared with all BriteCore clients. Participating in an open-source project was new for MMIC, but they were enthusiastic.
MMIC provided MassPrinting with a template of documents printed on a daily basis. MassPrinting used the template to launch a printing portal providing access to all necessary documents. MMIC processing staff reviewed and tested the daily print jobs from the portal before going live with the new procedure. The MMIC team took point on information gathering. MassPrinting managed all other aspects of the project, with MMIC staff serving as subject matter experts to ensure accuracy.
Measuring Success
MMIC outsourced their printing to MassPrinting in less than two months and went live in June 2018. The benefits have been immediate and significant. MMIC increased efficiencies and saved employee hours by reducing internal processing times by up to 88%. Benefits have been seen in three key areas:
API-Driven Implementation
MMIC credits the ease and success of the implementation to access to BriteCore’s print API. Data could be transferred securely from the BriteCore platform to MassPrinting, which then processed and organized the data into a printing portal for MMIC. This allowed portal configuration without large work requirements of MMIC staff. The web portal provided the flexibility of ordering print and mail jobs from anywhere with an available internet connection.
Cost Savings
MMIC can now send all deliverables electronically to mortgage billed policies and their entire agency force in a total of 225 offices. The savings in printing and postage alone over the 9-month timeframe recouped the cost of their entire BriteCore implementation. MMIC was also able to reduce overhead by eliminating the cost of rented warehouse space for document storage and reducing their office space by 54%. They also shredded over 5,000 boxes of archived documents.
Staff Workload
MMIC staff reported they were much happier after the MassPrinting implementation because they no longer had to spend so much time stuffing envelopes and troubleshooting equipment. The time spent on processing deliverables dropped from 12 – 16 hours every week to no more than two or three. As a result, MMIC was able to transfer the equivalent of four full-time employees (31% of MMIC’s total full-time staff!) to more valuable internal projects and cross-training efforts.
