The Customer

The Travelers Companies, Inc. sells a wide range of personal and business property and casualty insurance products including surety products. It is the second largest writer of commercial U.S. property casualty insurance in the U.S. and second largest writer of U.S. personal insurance through independent agents¹. Travelers has representatives in every U.S. state, Canada and the U.K. The IT department provides support to several lines of business in multiple locations. In 2006, Travelers began a project to streamline its operations, simplify its enterprise architecture and reduce its operational costs.

Taking on the challenge of consolidation and migration

In 1996, when Travelers needed to consolidate redundant IT systems, and migrate away from poorly performing solutions, they selected RSD as the vendor of choice for report distribution.
Through a carefully planned conversion, Travelers was able to achieve success on all aspects of the project, from the business process through the implementation. During the early business process phase, each line of business was asked to provide a listing of documents that would be included in the conversion. As a cost-savings measure, only documents that were currently running in production would be converted. Historical documents were left in the legacy archive, an ASG/Mobius product², which became static. All new application content—2,500 defined report types and several Jeslog output batch maintenance logs from commercial lines, property and casualty claims, specialty claims, corporate systems including AP and HR, and core IT systems – was defined to RSD’s EOS archive.

Performance Improvement in the Datacenter

Travelers used fiche as a storage medium for a number of years. Many reports were 10 million lines or more and very costly to produce. Storage and organization were also manual processes when researching information was required. In 2007, a company cost savings initiative was invoked. Travelers made the decision to use EOS as the preferred product to convert all of the fiche to online view only and to provide archiving and restore capabilities online for customers when needed. EOS also provides a Table of Contents (TOC) for each of the reports that allows employees to restore only the sections of data they need to review. This has saved many hours of processing time that was formerly required to restore 10 million-line reports.

Real Cost Reductions

For 35 years, RSD has been in the business of archiving reports in the financial services and insurance industry space, among other industries. As a result of this particular project, Travelers has saved approximately $300K per year using EOS as its archiving solution.

Vastly Improving User Experience

Another key benefit of the project for Travelers was to move away from older 327x technology to RSD’s EOS Thin Client online view. One user remarked, “The thin client tool is a huge improvement.” Users are able to organize and view information online in a manner which best suits them, such as selecting which columns to display. Another user commented, “I really like using the EOS Thin Client to view reports. It’s a lot easier than (Mobius’) InfoPac.”³

The project to convert from a legacy system to RSD’s EOS archive using the EOS Thin Client for viewing capabilities has enabled Travelers to streamline its operations and achieve operational efficiencies.

“Our conversion was seamless”

A year and a half later, the archive continues to grow. So too does the number of users signing on to the EOS application and beginning to learn about the products that RSD offers and how these products can improve their own personal career goals in the years ahead.

¹ Both for 2007 direct written premiums.

² Currently known as ASG’s ViewDirect product.

³ Ibid.

For more information, contact us at info@rsd.com