Australian superannuation fund VicSuper has introduced a Case360 workflow solution to help manage and document its process-intensive environment.

With 180 employees at five locations throughout metropolitan and regional Victoria, VicSuper administers in excess of $7.1 billion worth of members funds for more than 255,000 members.

The organisation decided to introduce a scanner into the mail room to replace much of the manual sorting, to reduce data entry demands on staff, reduce risk and to speed up cheque processing. Every week VicSuper receives well over 1,000 items through the mail, 70 per cent of which contain cheques that need to be separated, noted and processed before they can be banked and credited to member accounts.

Janine Westerbeek, Manager Employer Operations at VicSuper explains, “We employ some very qualified people and were getting them to spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks such as sorting and keying in information from forms that came in the mail. We wanted a software solution that would speed up our turn-around times and improve accuracy by eliminating manual errors.”

To meet the scanning needs, VicSuper selected an OPEX AS3690i high speed, high volume scanner.

“This took out some of the manual sorting previously required in the mail room, but it wasn't the whole solution that we needed,” Westerbeek adds. What VicSuper really wanted was to automatically classify forms, extract and validate data from incoming mail, and export that data in a format suitable for further processing in the workflow application. At the same time, the solution had to fully address the fund's compliance and risk management requirements.

“We'd heard about OCR [optical character recognition], a technology used in other industries but not yet widely adopted in superannuation and decided that this was where we needed to go,” Westerbeek says.

After looking at different suppliers VicSuper selected an EMC Captiva software system, installed by EMC partner, WindowLogic. It was a project that relied heavily on configuration and integration because, for any of VicSuper's efficiencies to be realised, it was critical that WindowLogic tie together the OPEX scanner, Captiva and Case360 into a single, end-to-end solution. It took three months to set up and test the system before going live.

Today, when mail enters the VicSuper mail room, it is scanned, automatically sorted and classified before being passed on to the organisation's workflow application.

Westerbeek says, “It has significantly improved our turn-around time, particularly around cheque processing. The new system allows us to credit member accounts within hours of the cheque arriving when in the past we could not even start the process until the cheque was receipted by the bank the next day. This is a great result for our members as their requests are actioned faster and they can see funds received immediately through VicSuper MembersOnline. So we're also getting less calls from members who want to know if we've received their cheque.”

Westerbeek notes, “We've eliminated some work from the mail room. Staff don't have to sort so much any more, just the exceptions where the software is not sure what to do.” The finance team has also benefited through a reduction in paperwork and time required for banking.

Financial year end test

The new mail room system experienced its first big test in the last week of June 2010, when it carried out end-of-financial year processing for the first time.

Always the busiest time of year for a fund, end-of-year sees a huge increase in mail as members scramble to make deposits to catch up on missed payments, meet legal obligations or take advantage of tax benefits.

“This year there was a lot less stress in the mail room,” Westerbeek observes. “Normally there are piles of mail waiting to be manually sorted and piles of cheques that the finance team has to try to bank before 5.00 pm. This year the envelopes were loaded onto the scanner and everything was quickly scanned. The scanner identified the cheques and put them into a neat pile. It printed out a summary of all the cheque information, and everything was passed on to the finance team. The process worked really well and we were comfortably completed before close of business,” Westerbeek confirms.

“We believe that this system has significantly improved our back office efficiency and is now freeing up our staff up to do more higher value tasks for our clients and deliver outstanding customer service.”