Life Insurance Society banks on the ISO long-term storage format PDF/A

Application requirements

The ALTE LEIPZIGER Life Insurance Society archives around 15 million incoming and outgoing documents every year. The incoming documents in particular represented a challenge due to the many different formats received through ALTE LEIPZIGER’s various channels such as email, fax and the agent’s portal. The main task was to convert image files (jpg, tif, png, bmp, gif ...), Office formats (doc, docx, rtf, xls, xlsx) and container formats (msg, eml, zip) to PDF/A.

Customer benefits

The conversion of documents with different formats and versions significantly reduced the number of clearing cases and documents that could not be processed automatically by electronic means.

Additionally, converted documents can be viewed in a single viewer, making it much easier to handle documents that were otherwise only available in many different formats.

By introducing the standard ISO format PDF/A for the long-term storage of electronic documents, the ALTE LEIPZIGER Life Insurance Society is banking on an internationally acknowledged standard for archiving methods.

Implementation

Within the scope of a preliminary investigation (April-July 2011) and evaluation with extensive testing of products from various manufacturers, a decision was made in favor of the 3-Heights® Document Converter product from PDF Tools AG following a call to tender.

The decisive reason was first and foremost the quality of results, runtime stability and the good price-performance ratio. German-language support and a fast response to queries during and after the evaluation phase are worthy of special mention.

Documents were converted in the test environment when the project began in January 2012. From March 2012 on, incoming documents were converted to PDF/A and archived in the live environment. Outgoing documents were processed in the same manner as of June 2012.