Industry: Insurance | Product: Adobe LiveCycle | Adobe Air | Avoka FormCenter | Avoka SmartForm Composer
Overland Solutions, Inc. (OSI) is a leader in business outsourcing services for the insurance industry. OSI teamed with Adobe and Avoka to take on a comprehensive overhaul of OSI’s systems and processes to create the OSI Remote Field Worker Mobile Application. The solution is an Adobe AIR application that gives OSI the ability to control the quality and consistency of data being captured in the field, enable their occasionally connected mobile workforce to schedule work orders, get site information, including maps and directions, and automatically receive all the forms necessary for the work order, finally it allows the field teams to work on site with or without the benefit of a network connection.
Click on the image below to watch David Robinson, CIO and SVP of OSI and Howard Treisman, CTO of Avoka Technologies, present the solution at the March 2011 Adobe Solution Showcase in New Orleans Louisiana (15 Mins.).
We are also pleased to announce that the OSI solution was one of the winning submissions of this showcase event.
Overland Solutions, Inc. (OSI) is a leader in business outsourcing services for the insurance industry. OSI's 2,500 field representatives provide premium audits, loss control consulting, commercial and residential inspection services, to clients across the US and parts of Canada, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.
Insurance companies engage OSI to gather the information they need to determine what risks to accept, and what to charge for the insurance provided. That process, called underwriting, is the fundamental determining factor of the success or failure of an insurance company. However some studies have shown that nearly 50% of reviewed applications had material errors that would effect underwriting. That staggering fact costs the industry billions per year.
Smart insurance companies realize that improving their underwriting decision making process is one of the most effective ways to increase profits. There are various approaches but one of the more popular approaches today is the use of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics uses data about the past to attempt to predict future outcomes, so it stands to reason that the only way to get a model that accurately predicts the future is to have very high quality data.
OSI saw an opportunity to enhance their leadership position by exploiting Adobe LiveCycle ES, Adobe AIR and Adobe PDF SmartForms to significantly increase the quality and consistency of the information they collected while also making their remote field workers more productive. They teamed with Adobe and Avoka to take on a comprehensive overhaul of OSI’s systems and processes.
There were a number of challenges that needed to be addressed if OSI was going to succeed:
- Controlling data quality and consistency: Controlling the quality and consistency of data being captured in the field required that OSI’s current static forms (paper, Word and Excel) be replaced by interactive and intelligent SmartForms that would eliminate input errors, make recommendations, and guide the user successfully through the data collection process. OSI selected Adobe PDF SmartForms to fill this need.
- Enabling an occasionally connected workforce: OSI needed a mobile application that would give their field workers the ability to schedule work orders, get site information, including maps and directions, and automatically receive all the forms necessary for the work order. They needed to enable on site work without the benefit of a network connection, which meant that business rules, validation logic, error correction, recommendations, and other intelligent features could run on the employee’s device with or without a network connection.
- Managing a large geographically disperse workforce: To manage a nationally distributed team of thousands of employees OSI required a self-updating mobile application, so that new releases could quickly be deployed, to the field reps, whenever necessary. Lastly mobile application had to support the broadest possible range of computing platforms, including the transition to low cost tablet devices in the future.
- Enabling client customization: OSI offers custom service offerings because many clients need different information to assess underwriting risks. This meant OSI would have to create thousands of customized PDF SmartForms to meet client’s specific information gathering requirements.
OSI teamed with Adobe and Avoka to take on a comprehensive overhaul of OSI’s systems and processes to create the OSI Remote Field Worker Mobile Application, an Adobe AIR solution that gives OSI:
Avoka developed a comprehensive Adobe LiveCycle solution that addressed OSI’s challenges you can learn more about that solution in by reading the two related OSI case studies.
Mobile Field Rep Application: Exploiting the power of mobile computing requires the selection of right software platform to fully support that new process. To learn how OSI exploited the power of mobile computing with Adobe LiveCycle ES, Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR read the OSI case study entitled “Game Changer - Empowering a Mobile Workforce”
PDF SmartForm Mass Customization: To learn how OSI used Avoka SmartForm Composer to cut the time and cost of developing/customizing thousands of PDF SmartForms by 86% read the companion OSI case study entitled “Mass Customizing PDF SmartForms”
To see a video of David Robinson CIO and SVP of Overland Solutions and Howard Treismen CTO of Avoka, presenting the award-winning OSI Remote Field Worker Solution at the Adobe Partner Summit, click here
Adobe AIR, Connect, Flex and LiveCycle are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Avoka Form Factory, FormCenter and SmartForm Composer are registered trademarks of Avoka Technologies.
