LONDON – November 26, 2009 – Financial services company Irish Life Corporate Business has reported a 35% productivity increase after the introduction of Global 360’s document management and business process management software solutions.

The pension company had grown 50% and left it with little visibility across its business processes. And with a team of 300 already in place, employing more staff to manage the paperwork was not sustainable. Instead, Irish Life embarked on an ambitious process engineering programme to overhaul the 150+ processes involved in running the business—working with its implementation partner Zarion and Global 360’s software solutions.

“We needed to take the paper out of the system to improve responsiveness, accuracy and quality for our customers,” explains Paul O’Neill, Head of IT and New Developments at Irish Life Corporate Business.

With 800 items of work coming in each day, there used to be a huge amount of photocopying. All document capture is now automated and standardised and jobs are allocated to the administration teams by 10am on the same day—a tremendous improvement on the 24 hours it previously took for correspondence to arrive from the post room.

Manual management processes have been replaced by standardised work management for complex multi-step processes and one-off activities alike. In addition, key processes for renewals, credit control and cash management have been automated, helping to improve productivity, visibility and customer service.

The overall solution, known internally as MIDAS, has become a mission critical solution for the business. Visibility has greatly improved and a key objective of standardisation has been achieved. David Harney, Irish Life Corporate Business CEO says, “It’s been the best thing IT has ever done for the business.”

Overall some service level agreements of 6 weeks have been reduced to just 18 days representing a significant improvement in Irish Life’s ability to manage its workloads. A business process management culture has been adopted throughout the business, including language, business case measurement and methodologies and so far, a 35% gain in productivity has been achieved. Morale has also increased and staff turnover has reduced from 20-30% in 1999 to just 6-8% in 2009.

David Harney, CEO concludes, “We now have a very solid and consistent infrastructure across the business. This enables us to look at processes in a much more disciplined way and immediately see where productivity improvements can be made. We are sure that we can deliver a further 20% in productivity improvements over the next 3-5 years across the business.”