ECM Software for Insurance Agencies

Documents are as crucial for construction projects as steel. Whether a building or a bridge, no project ever goes forward without contracts and engineering drawings—or insurance policies. While Construction Risk Partners excels at helping clients insure against risk, doing so was flooding its offices with cumbersome paper documents. Designed for value and easy to use, learn and support, GlobalSearch is helping the firm to operate more efficiently and profitably, while at the same time guarding against document losses and delivering improved client service.

“Adopting GlobalSearch allowed us to manage hundreds of thousands of paper documents quickly and efficiently,” said Bill Linney, one of Construction Risk Partners’ founders and a principal with the firm. “As a result of streamlining our business processes with GlobalSearch, we are benefiting from substantial savings in annual labor costs,” he added. “Important documents are now stored securely in GlobalSearch and cannot be misplaced or lost,” said Mary Bishop, Senior Client Manager. “They are literally ‘at our fingertips’ and our clients are impressed with how quickly we can access them. GlobalSearch is truly incredible. We have become enthusiastic advocates!”

Construction Risk Partners is an insurance brokerage and risk management firm dedicated to the needs of the construction industry. The firm matches contractors and other clients with insurance carriers and provides clients with a full suite of related services that include reviewing their insurance coverage and evaluating their operations and construction projects. The principals and staff of Construction Risk Partners function as business advisors, helping clients make the best insurance choices for their individual needs and collaborating with them to achieve optimal solutions.

“We work with our clients on a daily basis, effectively becoming an extension of their staff, and the partnerships we build with them form the foundation of our business,” Linney explained. “We care deeply about each of our clients,” Bishop added. “This differentiates us from our competitors, most of which are huge corporations that cannot exhibit the same level of personal concern for their clients that we do.” While Construction Risk Partners works with contractors engaged in all kinds of construction projects, from office buildings to infrastructure projects like highways and bridges, the firm’s primary clientele are larger organizations with sizeable insurance requirements. The founding partners have bonded and insured billions of dollars of construction projects and the firm is growing rapidly.

For years, Construction Risk Partners had been successfully filing, storing and retrieving a variety of documents using a sophisticated, paper-based system. When the firm began working in a new business discipline, however, this manual system was quickly overwhelmed. “The new discipline required us to manage massive volumes of documents for 20 different construction projects,” Bishop said. “Insurance certificates, payroll reports and enrollment applications for about 800 subcontractors were arriving daily by email, fax and regular mail.”

“Filing these paper documents became very burdensome for our staff,” Bishop continued, “and they occupied a lot of valuable storage space that could be used more productively. As the volume of paper documents increased, finding individual documents could sometimes be like looking for the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack.’ Also, many of them could not be replaced if they were ever damaged or lost. We realized that only an advanced Electronic Content Management solution would solve these challenges, and that’s when we turned to GlobalSearch.”

Now, Construction Risk Partners is using GlobalSearch to manage documents electronically. As new documents are received each day, most as PDF files, they are entered directly into a GlobalSearch Inbox and quickly indexed by contract number and other key reference data for reliable, nearly instantaneous retrieval when needed. The solution proved so successful for Construction Risk Partners in the first year that the firm chose to expand its use of GlobalSearch throughout the entire organization.

Hundreds of thousands of critical documents are now stored securely in GlobalSearch and backed up routinely, guarding against loss. “In the insurance industry, it’s critical to have documents memorialized because claims can be filed at any time in the future,” Bishop explained. “We must be able to find the necessary information quickly and GlobalSearch ensures that we can do that.”

The firm’s increased efficiency is translating into measurable cost savings and improved customer service. “I estimate that GlobalSearch is saving our firm the cost of one employee-day per week,” Linney reported. “Based on our clerical-level salary and benefits, this works out to more than $14,500 in cost savings annually because that valuable time is now being utilized to perform other tasks.” “GlobalSearch really impresses our clients,” Bishop said. “When a client calls and we need to find a document, I can often retrieve it in just a few seconds and then email it to them while we’re still talking. It’s very satisfying to hear them exclaim ‘How did you get that so fast?’”

“I would highly recommend GlobalSearch,” Linney proclaimed. “GlobalSearch helped us eliminate paper, streamline our operations and store documents safely. If you have to manage thousands of documents efficiently and securely and you want to be able to retrieve them in just seconds, GlobalSearch could be a tremendous asset to your organization.”