Lou Balicki, Vice President of Information Systems for Century National Insurance had a dream. Every day thousands of letters were sent to their insured clients and, by law, copies of every one of those letters had to be printed, catalogued, filed and stored for at least seven years. His dream was to turn that river of paper and mountain of file boxes into a small stack of shiny optical disks.

In a typical day documents generated by the company's mid-range and server-based systems are sent to laser printers as PCL files. Mr. Balicki's concept was to tap into the print stream and capture the print files, convert them to TIFF (a compressed file format) and send them to a document management system where they could be stored and retrieved. There was also a need to include scanned documents in the system.

General Networks working with Century National identified the following key requirements: the documents stored on the disks had to be (for legal reasons) unalterable; the information had to be rapidly accessible to the staff for reference; there had to be a complete audit trail to ensure that no documents were lost; and there had to be safeguards in place to recover documents in the event of a system failure. General Networks designed the hardware and software system to meet those requirements.

The unalterability of documents required that they be written to an optical WORM (write once read many) device. But rapid accessibility required that the data be stored on magnetic media as optical jukebox systems are notoriously slow. The solution was to create a system where the documents were simultaneously written to both magnetic and optical media. Using a Hierarchical Storage Management from OTG a 108 GB Compaq RAID storage system was married to a Plasmon Optical Jukebox. PCL files were captured from the print stream, converted to TIFF, indexed, logged into the document management system and stored. Safeguards are in place to ensure that all documents generated are correctly stored on the system and that a system failure will not result in documents being lost. Finally the optical system is used to create copies of the document disks which are then stored off-site. Mr. Balicki's dream of a small stack of optical disks is becoming reality.

Currently the Claims Department at Century National Insurance has automated their document capture. Eventually all departments will be using the system, saving Century National considerable time and expense handling, storing and retrieving paper files. As the system proves its stability they plan to eventually move completely away from paper.

According to Mr. Balicki, "We will not only see the simple cost savings in the production and storage of paper, but more importantly, we can now give our users and clients quick access to the paper-based data they need to conduct their business. It's this reduction in the 'paper chase' that's the real benefit!"