The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims
ICHEIC Business Challenge
The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC) was established in 1998 following negotiations among European insurance companies, U.S. insurance regulators, as well as representatives of the international Jewish and survivor organizations as well as the State of Israel.
ICHEIC is charged with establishing a just process to collect and facilitate the signatory companies' processing of insurance claims from the Holocaust period.
ICHEIC was the first organization ever to offer Holocaust survivors and their heirs an avenue to pursue a claim against an insurance company at no cost. The Commission was created as a means of addressing the gaps and shortfalls of postwar compensation programs of the 1950s and 1960s and was intended to provide an opportunity for thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs to submit claims for the first time.
ICHEIC deployed Claromentis in 2004 to assist with the massive document management, searching and collaboration task this project represents.
“Our specialists recognised from the outset that simply purchasing a normal document management system was not a solution for us. We needed a system that could be designed to follow our own procedures, working with our various and diverse stakeholders around the world to provide the information and productivity they needed. Claromentis™ provided exactly that flexibility.”
Markus Ketola : Records Manager : ICHEIC
Knowledge Management Requirements
Key considerations were the proven robustness and scalability of Claromentis™, ease of management, and ease of use, with excellent documentation and tight integration with desktop development tools. As a charitable foundation budget was also an issue, ICHEIC were pleasantly surprised at the low total cost of ownership of such a sophisticated collaboration system as Claromentis™. All of the system was implemented with no local software required, all functions could be accessed through only a browser thus requiring minimal training and impact on the IT infrastructure.
Starting the Project
“We partnered with an excellent scanning company for the routing of the initial paper files into our system” said Ian Green, Partner Manager of Claromentis. He added “we have many partners in place to deliver specialist functionality as needed, with no added complexity for the end client. From then it was an issue of gradually introducing the new developments in the system as the client required.”
Consulting the Project
With regular discussions, we were able to continually tweak the system to ensure it worked perfectly with their processes and if something wasn’t working quite how they expected, it was fine tuned. Our relationship was built up during the project and because of this we were able to work very closely ensuring the end product was successful.
Overcoming the Problems
Claromentis staff were able to develop the functionality of Claromentis™ to fit ICHEIC’s specific requirements. “Although a particularly complex and significant project, taking the Claromentis™ framework and adding significant bespoke functionality, workflows and reports is exactly what our implementation teams are used to.” Nigel Davies, London Project Manager for Claromentis.
The Results
ICHEIC was able to implement the software easily under the guidance of the Claromentis Team. Since the implementation of Claromentis™, ICHEIC has achieved the following:
Claromentis is used to:
• Search and manage over 3 million documents, using hardware that was within the ICHEIC budget.
• Automatically route scanned new correspondence into appropriate sections of the document store.
• Open, manage, escalate and assign all issues and questions through a Claromentis Business Information Manager Project, include automatic parsing of incoming emails.
• Route and manage hardcopy data to the warehouse.
• Produce reports on the progress of the project.
• Automatically synchronise and update a large and complex metadata recourse held on a completely different platform in another location.
• Greatly increase efficiency within many areas of this enormous and complex task.
“Of particular importance to ICHEIC was the ongoing support. Claromentis™, responded to this by setting up an enhanced support contract that allowed ICHEIC preferential rates for development, exclusive access direct into our third level support engineers that normal clients do not require, and several days of contact meetings per year. We felt ICHEIC would benefit enormously if knowledge of their DB was at an introductory level so we arranged training for them as a part of our commitment to supporting their bespoke system”
Justin Hay, Claromentis Support Manager.
More detail about Claromentis™
Claromentis™ is the premier communication and collaboration solution for the Service Sector. Claromentis™ delivers a suite of integrated solutions; 2nd Generation Intranet, Knowledge Management, CRM, Self Service and Dashboards. Avoiding the point paradigm of recent years Claromentis™ takes an integrated approach to communication and collaboration allowing for immediate adoption for ‘out of the box’ value whilst adapting to the growth patterns of individual clients.
www.claromentis.com
Claromentis™ Works. The way you do.
For more information contact:
sales@claromentis.com
+44 (0)1293 89 71 89 reception
