Insuring the Future
National Crop Insurance Services is using DocuWare throughout their organization to manage email, accounting records, meeting minutes, time cards, and most importantly, information distributed to its members. Having easy immediate access to essential information is invaluable for this not-for-profit.
National Crop Insurance Services is an international not-for-profit organization representing the 18 crop insurance companies that sell Federal crop insurance, as well as others that write private crop-hail insurance only. NCIS members write crop-hail insurance, the federally-supported risk management program and privately developed crop insurance products, totaling more than $11 billion in premiums, with an insured value of nearly $150 billion in 2014. On behalf of its members, NCIS collects and manages data and information, conducts research and analysis, serves as a licensed statistical agency for the crop-hail program and conducts extensive educational activities on claims adjustment, ethics, policies and procedures.
NCIS members range in size from one-state companies to national writers, as well as international company members. The companies service all farmers participating in the federal program, including limited-resource and socially disadvantaged farmers. In partnership with the government, these private companies deliver the safety net that equitably provides effective risk management tools to America’s farmers and ranchers.
Requirements
With a staff of 45, NCIS needed a secure single location where it could store and manage their corporate documents such as internal meeting minutes, information from the federal government and bulletins it distributes to its members. They were also in need of a better way to track the different versions of notes as they worked towards making a decision and they needed to be able to easily research when and why a decision was made. The organization also needed to update its document retention policy regarding email in order free up room on its servers. In general, they saw the benefit of making their processes as paperless as possible.
Solution
NCIS spoke with their trusted IT vendor about their needs. As an Authorized DocuWare Partner, their IT vendor recommended and installed DocuWare. The software was initially rolled out to the HR department and all employees were trained on how to use the software to manage time cards, time sheets and time off requests. This was done to help the entire organization feel comfortable with DocuWare before it was rolled out to other areas with more complex work processes.
Next, DocuWare was rolled out to manage meeting minutes with long term retention schedules. Today, meeting minutes are stored in DocuWare making them available from a laptop, phone or tablet, eliminating emailing out the notes. Version control is used to help the staff keep track of high priority decisions and to document the evolution of policy decisions. NCIS decided to back scan Board of Director minutes to 1997.
“Because agriculture policy is based on long term results it is very helpful to be able to use DocuWare’s full text search feature and research our own internal database,” said Jim Crist, Chief Financial and Operations Officer for National Crop Insurance Services.
In the past, five to six times a year NCIS would mail a CD to its members containing a federal report for every county and crop in the nation. Today, member agents can login to DocuWare through NCIS’ website and download or access the information that is pertinent to them for their clients. Agents use this information to determine the premium and coverage amount for crops, so knowing that they are always looking at the most current information is critical.
Benefits
The more NCIS used DocuWare the more uses they found for the software. Their DocuWare system has expanded from purely storing HR and meeting minutes to a seamless integration with Peachtree, their accounting system. NCIS can access their AP invoices and other accounting records that are stored in a DocuWare file cabinet directly from the accounting software. When an invoice is processed in the accounting software, the index fields for the image of the actual invoice are updated automatically, keeping both software solutions working together.
“We love having all our documents in their native formats stored in one location. Peace of mind and ease of retrieval have been the biggest benefits we’ve received from DocuWare,” said Crist.
For NCIS, knowing that their members and staff have easy access to current and historical data and reports fulfills their primary objective of providing its members with the information to develop fair underwriting for crop insurance.
Using version control for meeting minutes lets NCIS manage their meeting minutes with transparency. Version 1 is the working draft, version 2 means the minutes have been approved by the Legal Department, version 3 minutes contain revisions. At the next meeting, the version 3 minutes are opened, formally approved and stored as version 4. By using version numbers, the staff can see what changes were made and where in the process they were made for complete transparency.
The organization was also able to update their document retention policy. Important email can be archived in DocuWare in its native format and easily searched. All other messages are stored for two years then deleted. By implementing this policy, the organization was able to free up needed room on its email server and guarantee that vital content was not lost.
Conclusion
Using DocuWare for records management has become essential for NCIS because their information is securely stored and searchable, giving the organization peace of mind similar to the way crop insurance brings peace of mind to agricultural producers. In 2014, 1.2 million policies were sold protecting more than 120 different crops covering 294 million acres, an area larger than Texas and California combined, with an insured value of $110 billion. The impact of NCIS’ work ripples out to affect us all.
“Having immediate easy access to information, it is priceless,” concluded Crist.
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Tasks
Create a single location for all information
Facilitate the distribution of information to members
Track meeting minutes versions
Benefits
Peace of Mind
Access to information
Ability to search for information
Long-term secure storage
National Crop Insurance Services
Industry: Not-for-profit
Location: Kansas, USA
Application: Company-wide records management
Document Types: time cards, email, accounting records, meeting minutes, bulletins
DocuWare Corporation | 4 Crotty Lane, Suite 200 | New Windsor, NY 12553
(888) 565-5907 | www.docuware.com
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