Sanlam Radically Improves Service Delivery, Processing Times and Business Growth

A financial services company established in 1918 in South Africa, Sanlam places great emphasis on customer service. The company considers Kofax a major enabler of that business goal, “touching more processes on a daily basis than any other application.” Products deployed include Kofax Capture, Kofax Transformation Modules, Kofax Monitor and Kofax VRS Elite.

Sanlam’s head office is responsible for the company’s centralized functions such as strategic direction, financial and risk management, human resources and corporate social investment. IT Infrastructure Shared Services, which is responsible for Sanlam’s document handling processes enterprise wide among many other things, also operates out of the head office.

“Within Sanlam, each business process starts with some sort of document that’s been received and must be captured, enhanced and released,” said Hugo Oberholzer, ECM Application Specialist. “With 17 business units and R409 billion of assets under management, Sanlam handles an extraordinary number of documents daily and we are continuously looking to refine, enhance and improve our business processes. We also have SLAs to meet that ensure our customers are receiving the best possible service.”

To optimize operating performance, data accuracy and security, as Sanlam continued to rapidly grow, the IT Infrastructure Shared Services Group began an evaluation of information capture and business process management solutions.

After an extensive evaluation of available solutions, the Sanlam team decided on a solution comprised of Kofax Capture™, Kofax Transformation Modules™ (KTM), Kofax Monitor™ and Kofax VRS Elite^® (VRS).

Kofax Capture provides industry leading scan-to-archive capabilities by scanning documents and forms to create digital images, extracting index data for retrieval purposes and delivering the images and associated data to a variety of repositories and applications. This can significantly reduce retrieval costs while improving regulatory and compliance efforts.

KTM adds document classification, page separation, data extraction and validation capabilities to Kofax Capture to drive robust capture-to-process applications. By automating what were previously labor intensive, error prone and time consuming tasks, KTM can significantly reduce labor costs, improve information quality and accelerate business processes.

Kofax VRS Elite is Kofax’s patented image enhancement and perfection software which reduces the time involved in manual document preparation and enhances the quality of scanned images, dramatically improving both manual scanning productivity and the efficiency of document capture processes.

Kofax Monitor provides real time monitoring and performance capabilities to ensure the operational health of Kofax Capture, and advanced recognition and communication systems.

“We have corporate standards to adhere to,” said Oberholzer. “We needed a pure enterprise architecture with high availability and Kofax is known for both. Also, we are an IBM and Microsoft shop and Kofax was very easy to integrate with our existing infrastructure.” The fact that Kofax has thousands of successful implementations globally gave the team additional confidence they made the right choice for Sanlam.

Today, the Kofax solution is deployed centrally at Sanlam and managed and monitored via a service level agreement with each business unit. “Some SLAs are governed by an end-to-end process of just five minutes from capture to release,” said Oberholzer. “Before Kofax, that level of service was impossible.”

The Kofax solution is also linked to service processes such as application forms. The solution has led to massive improvements in processing times and business growth. According to Oberholzer, the implementation integration was efficient and within budget.

Oberholzer concluded, “Kofax is mission critical at Sanlam, touching more processes on a daily basis than any other application. Kofax is a major business enabler.”