Over a million pieces of mail flow through Standard Life's document services department each year. In order to reduce the amount of time and effort required to identify and route mail to the correct departments, Standard Life decided to introduce EMC's advanced Captiva InputAccel and Dispatcher software in its primary office, based in Edinburgh. This software augments its existing workflow system, Automated Workflow Distributor (AWD) by DST Systems, and allows Standard Life to automatically classify, index and route its mail. Due to success to-date, Standard Life expects to roll out this process to its other departments, automating the whole process by up to 90 per cent.

Gerry Timoney, change consultant, Standard Life said: "This recognition technology will allow us to route a large proportion of documents, applications and sales orders automatically instead of staff having to look at the document on screen and decide where it goes. This gives staff immediate access to information, so decisions can be made based on the most up-to-date data. By streamlining these transactional processes we are now able to respond to customers far more effectively."

EMC's Captiva image clean-up and enhancement capabilities ensure that all documents are scanned correctly. It does this through a combination of techniques including matching images or templates and identifying key words, phrases or codes. Data can then be automatically classified and passed on to the correct work queue or Department. This enables Standard Life to monitor customer correspondence from end to end and comply more easily with legislative and regulatory requirements.

EMC Captiva software is interoperable with existing scanning, workflow and repository components that support Standard Life's recognition technology including AWD by DST and its purchasing system, UBUY. Through its ability to work in heterogeneous environments, this software provides a streamlined, efficient scanning process.

Gerry Timoney, change consultant, Standard Life said: "The success of this project to-date has inspired us to roll out additional projects within document scanning and retrieval services. We're pleased with the results so far and look forward to furthering our relationship with EMC to position our departments for future growth as a group wide shared service provider."

Ivan Fernandez, Director of Financial Services, EMC Content Management Group said: "EMC Captiva welcomed the opportunity to support Standard Life to manage information more efficiently. The fact that Standard Life has already experienced benefits from this project demonstrates that they can expect even greater cost savings once this project is rolled out to other departments. We've already been able to automate some of the transactional processes by quite a bit, which means we had the right technology and expertise to run the project. We're looking forward to the significant long-term business benefits that Standard Life will enjoy across the whole organisation as a result of this implementation."