CSE Insurance Benefits from an AS/400-Friendly Document Management System with Advanced Function Printing

AFP support is an essential element of the LaserVault system, says Gordon Ching, IT manager for CSE Insurance Group.

Civil Service Employees Insurance Group was founded in 1949 in San Francisco, California to provide equitable insurance options for public employees. In the 1980's, CSE expanded its insurance opportunities to the general public, continuing its tradition of offering quality protection at affordable prices.

As part of a paper-reduction initiative, CSE purchased a LaserVault document management system to index and store reports off of their AS/400. We talked with Gordon Ching, the IT manager for CSE, and Erik Dabrowsky, our chief programmer, about the experience of working together to reduce CSE’s paper costs through implementing a document management system for their AS/400.

Advanced Function Printing

“One of our major requirements was that the document management system be able to support AFP for AS/400s,” says Gordon. “We get a number of calls from our clients, insurers, who sometimes misplace their policy declaration page, and they would call in for a second copy, or another copy, and we are obligated to provide them with an exact duplicate. The policy declaration page is very graphical, it has logos, boxes, a lot of fonts, different styles and so forth, and we had to make sure we were able to replicate that from LaserVault. That meant being able to get the data stream from the AS/400 into LaserVault, and then later being able to print the report from LaserVault with the same result as if we had printed it directly from the AS/400.”

Erik Dabrowsky,chief programmer at Electronic Storage Corporation, explains how this is done, “What we do is use line printer remote on the AS/400. The AS/400 has what's called a host print transform function that will convert the print data to HP PCL printer codes. When the data is sent to the LaserVault system, it reads that PCL code, and pulls the report text from it. LaserVault then saves the original PCL in a compressed format for re-printing to HP printers, and still has the text version for searching and building keys.”

“We worked closely with Electronic Storage Corporation to get this necessary function into the system,” explains Gordon, “We shared information and collaborated in other ways to get that feature in.”

Saves paper

“Our initiative was paper reduction. On a monthly basis we save a number of reports daily, weekly, and monthly. Overall, I would put the number of reports we print monthly to over 600. Before we were using LaserVault it was all paper, LaserVault was our first attempt in reducing our paper costs, distribution costs, and so forth. LaserVault has allowed us to reduce the amount of paper used in addition to the man power used in printing and distributing those same documents. Information is now available first thing in the morning.”

Gordon tells us. “We looked at a number of vendors besides yourself, and it came down finally to the user-friendliness of the product and the ability to take those reports and apply the NeXtract data mining feature. That plus the cost were the factors that really went into us choosing your product.”