case study: stewart title
Customer Profile
Since 1893 Stewart Title has been a leader in the title insurance industry, offering world-class service and the highest quality products. Today Stewart Title has more than 6,000 offices around the globe, including 13 locations in Harris County, Texas employing over 270 associates, as well as numerous offices in Galveston, Brazoria, Montgomery and Fort Bend counties.
Application
According to Larry Couch, Technology and Operations Manager of Stewart Title Houston, company offices in all five counties are utilizing DocSTAR technology primarily for archiving their older files. Couch's Harris County operation is currently going through these files and pulling approximately 50 documents per file they wish to save. Then they are scanning them into the DocSTAR system as archives of the file, employing a single number for indexing purposes. The Harris County operation consists of a single server and three scan stations.
The Problem
Before the advent of DocSTAR, Couch says his operation was stripping down and consolidating all records, then placing them on microfilm for archival. Unfortunately, the microfilm had a nasty habit of growing brittle over time, often breaking and resulting in lost images. Adding to the problem, the best indexing method they had was to assign a range of file numbers from 1 to 5,000 on each roll, which meant staff would sit for long periods of time navigating through rolls trying to find a particular image by numerical order. In Larry's Harris County operation alone, the archived title documents occupied roughly 10,000 boxes, which were stored in a costly offsite facility.
The Solution
Now, with DocSTAR, Couch's staff are taking the documents they want to archive, scanning them and indexing them to a single GF number. Now Stewart Title employees can find this number utilizing a name, address or other terms, allowing them to access any information then need about any file within seconds. In addition, they no longer need to have their files in numerical order as they did with their former archiving system. Couch has also upgraded the system to store documents on DVD media which are stored off-site on duplicate discs, allowing staff to recover all data and indexing in the event of hard drive failure.
The Benefits
Couch estimates he's saving an average of 50 pages per file by archiving his records with DocSTAR. Storing these documents offsite was costing more than $7,000 a month, and when Couch's staff needed to access these files, they would have to pay the storage facility an additional fee and specify which box they needed. "In the long run, we're looking at savings of thousands of dollars a month with DocSTAR because of our dramatically reduced needs for off-site storage." Couch said.
He added that DocSTAR was extremely easy to operate and user-friendly. "We have individuals we�ve hired as summer help or through school programs, and it's typical for these people to sit down at the system never having used it before and be proficient within a day."
"The system was also extremely fast to implement," Couch said. DocSTAR provided all the hardware and software already installed, so his staff was able to begin archiving with it immediately.
Unlike other systems which offered more complex functionality than Couch needed, DocSTAR was completely scalable to his operation, offering as much or as little as he needed. He was also very impressed with the responsiveness of DocSTAR's technical staff in Schenectady, New York, who helped his staff resolve issues in a very timely manner.
