KnowledgeCenter

Rattner Mackenzie (a subsidiary of HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc.) is an innovative specialist Insurance and Reinsurance broker, located in London, New York and Bermuda. In recent years, a growing proportion of the key business information coming into the London office has arrived in the form of e-mail. But there can be problem with e-mail when looking to manage business relationships, as Steve Ahern, CEO of Rattner Mackenzie, points out:

“E-mail is fast to send and receive and definitely easier than moving paper around. But it’s a real headache to us as a business because each e-mail is trapped in the In Box of whoever the recipient happened to be.”

Rattner Mackenzie needed a way of quickly, easily and securely storing those key business e-mails and making them accessible throughout the enterprise as a business asset. The answer was KC 1View.

Using KC 1View, users can access the full power of the KCenter Document Management System (DMS) directly within Microsoft Outlook. The DMS filing structure is displayed as a folder tree right below the standard Outlook folders. Adding a new e-mail to the DMS is simply a matter of dragging it from the Outlook In-Box and dropping it onto a folder in the DMS folder structure. Crucially, KCenter automatically picks up all the information it needs to index the document directly from the DMS folder.

Steve Ahern again said:

“We have had DMS before, but this is the first time we have been able to index e-mails without any additional data input being needed – and that makes the whole process a lot more efficient and acceptable to busy users.”

By allowing e-mails to be filed in the DMS directly alongside all other documents, KCenter is delivering true consolidation of policy information. The users now only have one place to look for all the information they need about a risk and this is achieved while at the same time removing the dependency on paper.

The KCenter DMS at Rattner Mackenzie is integrated with the company’s Twins - risk and claims management system - from Trace. This is two-way integration, allowing KCenter to retrieve risk information from Twins and allowing Twins to store documents it generated in the KCenter DMS.

When there is no existing folder for a particular document, the user enters the bare minimum of index data. The remaining data is automatically populated via calls to Web Services exposed on the Twins system. All of this is achieved without any specific coding – just using the standard configuration features of KCenter. This is the first deployment of KCenter’s new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration capability and KnowledgeCenter CTO, John Pile, is delighted with it working just as designed:

“It is only recently that we have seen our customer base adopt SOA as reality, not just as theory. The ability of KCenter to consume Web Services exposed by other systems, in both our DMS and Workflow functionality, means that our solutions can fit straight into infrastructures that are based on SOA.”

Learn more about KC 1View