SAIF
A true technology partnership accelerates SAIF's digital agility, transforming business processes across the organization.
The challenge
Meeting evolving customer needs in a digital world
SAIF provides workers' compensation insurance in the U.S. state of Oregon. Facing significant changes in the marketplace, Ken Collins, chief information officer at SAIF, is committed to successfully addressing today’s evolving data-driven challenges — and leveraging the right emerging technology to further the mission of the organization. Rather than maintaining technology that requires custom development, SAIF is moving to platforms that enable IT teams to rapidly configure solutions that meet the evolving needs of the marketplace.
To take the vendor relationship and truly make it a partnership means that we need to understand our vendors and we need our vendors to understand us, our needs and our goals. We’ve had great success working with Hyland, and continue to move forward on our initiatives.
— Ken Collins, Chief Information Officer, SAIF
The solution
SAIF chose the Hyland content services platform, OnBase, for critical electronic document and data workflows — in large part because of its low-code and extensible integration capabilities — and has transformed business processes across the organization.
Scott Clark, technology architecture supervisor at SAIF, shared “We knew from the very beginning that OnBase and Guidewire had a strong integration that was going to save us effort and time in implementing both systems.
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Overcoming early challenges together yielded a partnership built on shared goals and outcomes
The path forward was not always a straight line, but what illuminated the way was SAIF’s strong partnership with Hyland Global Services. The first project was a document conversion effort for claims, SAIF’s biggest division by far, and the teams encountered some challenges including:
- Converting 42 million documents to OnBase from a 15-year-old system
- Large-scale optimization of complex taxonomy
- Remote team collaboration
- Successful change management for a highly-tenured, 500 person workforce.
“But both teams just came together.” said Brigitte Hamilton, director of portfolio and project management. And after a successful go-live for the claims project, the teams conducted a deep retrospective review of the project.
“One of the fundamental things that I believe we did in that retrospective was to reset our client vendor relationship to truly be a partnership. It’s crucial to be able to have frank conversations with our partners...to communicate effectively and honestly,” Collins said.
And the subsequent conversion projects for other areas of the business?
Clark shared, “It was just an amazing turnaround from the first project to the second project. Such a good shift. And these things are really difficult, really complex, but in the second one it didn’t feel that way. We really had it nailed.”
42 million documents
converted from 15-year legacy system to OnBase
From 24 hours to minutes
turnaround time to deliver comprehensive packets of information, digitally
Instant document access
enables better, faster service, even working from home
The difference
Paperless automated workflows reduce timeframes for complex processes, improving service
“[With OnBase] what used to take a day is happening in minutes. It has been a huge benefit to our internal partners and our external customers,” said Hamilton.
“Being able to have the adjusters work from home and access documents immediately, and being able to create an excellent customer experience really helps both injured workers and policyholders,” said Brad Vinson, third-party recovery managing attorney.
Clark concluded, “Hyland is definitely committed to SAIF’s success. At every level we have somebody that I can talk to or we have somebody from SAIF who can talk to Hyland, and I feel like it’s really a strong relationship.”