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Document Automation Helps Diversified Investment Advisors Decrease Ops Budget by $1.3 Million

Print-on-demand capabilities help investment advisory firm eliminate manual document generation processes.

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Diversified Investment Advisors, a Purchase, N.Y.-based investment advisory firm that specializes in retirement plans, services more than 2,000 plans for 1.2 million participants. To keep up with growing volumes of the heavily customized plans -- wherein each client gets its own plan provisions, branding and messaging -- this past August the firm streamlined its documentation process, which is the operations group's primary function, according to Jami Wysota, Diversified Investment Advisors' VP of participant solutions.

In the past, enrollment books, confirmations and other plan documents that are sent to clients were handled in what was called the "pick-and-pack" method, Wysota says. Operations staff would go to the shelves and pick the 60-page enrollment book, privacy notice, account access brochure and other materials, put them in an envelope and mail them off, she explains. "It was a labor-intensive, high-cost process," Wysota recalls. "There was no ability to customize the documentation because everything was sitting on a shelf somewhere."

To cut labor requirements and improve service, Diversified Investment Advisors automated the document-generation process several years ago using software from HP Exstream. Now staff leverage templates to create and print customized documentation on demand, according to Wysota, who explains that text, photos and other graphics can be easily swapped in and out and plan documents updated without requiring a design department or technical assistance.

As a result of the automation, the firm was able to decrease its operations budget by $1.3 million this year, Wysota reports. The new software saves 50 cents on each welcome kit sent to new plan participants; the firm sends out approximately 350,000 welcome kits a year, generating an additional savings of about $175,000 per year, she adds.

The software also accelerates the process. "Diversified Investment Advisors in the fourth quarter of 2009 added 91 clients on the books, which is a tremendous amount of volume for us," Wysota relates. "If every client needed to change our standard materials just slightly, there would be no way to keep up with that manually."

Wysota sees this type of document automation and customization as a growing requirement in the retirement services industry. "The big thing we see in the retirement industry is major demand by clients to customize core materials -- just taking things off the shelf doesn't cut it any more," she says. "We're seeing our competitors beginning to offer the same type of thing."

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