How Mutuelle Générale des Cheminots Optimised Its Document Management with Maarch Digital Flow

Background and origin of the project

As part of the modernization of its operations, the Mutuelle Générale des Cheminots (MGC) launched a study in 2020 on the digitization of its processes and documents, initially building on the changes imposed during the first COVID-19 lockdown period to keep MGC’s operations running.

Setting up mail-scanning processes with the resources available at the time demonstrated MGC’s ability to implement fast, operational processes to meet business requirements — in this case, the electronic distribution of mail received by post following its digitization.

Catherine Cazaux, IT Services Director at MGC

Following this study, MGC decided to launch a project to implement an effective solution for managing incoming mail and client files, storage with a digital vault, and distributing the resulting flows to the various business-line IT systems.

The objectives were to optimize service quality for members, to ensure consistent service quality regardless of work arrangement (on-site or remote), and to ensure compliance with data protection rules and the evidentiary value of digitized documents.

The MGC group chose Xelians to improve the quality of its relationship with members and partners

A call for tenders brought established document management (GED) players into competition, including Access, Numen, Docaposte, Canon, Tessi, and DocuWare. The Maarch Digital Flow solution fully met MGC’s various criteria. Choosing a solution new to the market, even though it might seem riskier, was actually more logical : the solution could adapt more readily to MGC’s needs and evolve alongside business requirements, since it was still under active development. Moreover, its price is very competitive compared to the rest of the market.

Catherine Cazaux – IT Services Director at MGC

The project

The project was officially launched in March 2022

It began with a prototyping phase that validated the assumptions made during the general design stage. This resulted in the rollout, from May 2022, of a first version of the application featuring the acquisition of postal mail through scanning for integration into the GED. A second version in July 2022 extended the scope to emails and faxes. 

We then worked through successive iterations between July 2022 and February 2023 to improve the results of automated document recognition and reading, as well as to integrate business applications on two fronts : the use of reference data such as the member database, the prospect database, and the coding used by business applications, and the transfer of data to business applications for assigning tasks to the agents handling requests. 

Spring 2023 was devoted to the transition phase, with user training and full acceptance testing of the application. The application went live on June 7, followed by a period of go-live support.

The Xelians teams supported us throughout the project, from the requirements-gathering phase through to day-to-day operational follow-up. Their excellent understanding of organizational challenges and their skills across all technical aspects enabled us to successfully carry out this complex and ambitious project. Even when we ran into technical difficulties, the Maarch teams were extremely responsive. They rose to the various challenges and requests from MGC, and some development requests deemed relevant were fully incorporated into the product.

Jean Pondy, Document Management Application Manager

Results

Implementing the solution made it possible to industrialize the acquisition of incoming requests from multiple channels, with centralized scanning of postal mail and automated capture of incoming emails and faxes, while limiting the manual work involved in qualifying and indexing mail.

Digital documents and collected data are stored in the GED within Xelians’ hosting infrastructure, which guarantees their security and retention in compliance with the various regulatory requirements, notably around electronic archiving with evidentiary value and health data hosting.

These flows are integrated into business applications such as the Efficy E-Deal CRM and the ASSIA mutual insurance management application, in order to distribute tasks to the agents responsible for handling them. This has eliminated double data entry.

Operational monitoring and management are handled through reports and statistics available in dashboards, which are exported to feed MGC’s BI tool. 

MGC and Xelians today:

• 800 requests per day: reimbursements, third-party payments, membership applications, supporting documents, etc. 1,500 digital documents secured per day, 300,000 pieces of postal mail and 30,000 emails received per year.
• 165,000 payment schedules and 265,000 membership cards will be archived for members

Today, it is mainly the mail team that uses the solution, but MGC plans to extend its use to other departments, with the long-term goal of having an enterprise-wide GED.

Benefits

The application enables high responsiveness in handling the case-management actions triggered by requests received from MGC members and partners, thanks to smoother document flow, shared (but controlled) access to documents for the people responsible for processing them, and reminder and alert systems to monitor compliance with task processing deadlines.

The application is user-friendly and well-liked by users. With its flexible design, it can handle both physical and digital flows, integrates easily with our IT system, and evolves continuously in response to our specific current and future needs.

Jean Pondy, Document Management Application Manager

Next steps

All business processes will gradually be affected by document digitization. Cross-functional processes will be implemented first to feed a task management workflow for a business process, including the creation and publication of contractual documents and the management of outgoing mail.

Closing words

Xelians Digital Flow is an all-in-one solution, flexible and scalable, with a single point of contact to support us over the long term.

Catherine Cazaux – IT Services Director at MGC