Since 1928, United States Aircraft Insurance Group (USAIG) has provided a full spectrum of coverage options for owners, operators, manufacturers, and maintainers of corporate, private, and commercial aircraft. The company is a world aviation insurance leader delivering innovative, custom-tailored insurance products and services. United States Aviation Underwriters, Inc. manages USAIG, maintaining the industry’s largest network of underwriting and field claims offices. USAIG is a subsidiary of General Reinsurance Corporation, a Berkshire Hathaway company.
For many years, the company printed and mailed reports, invoices, and other documents to its members, re-insurers, and co-insurers worldwide. USAIG was looking for a way to distribute these documents electronically and found Redwood Software’s Report2Web. This web-based document management and report distribution solution securely captures, stores, publishes, and distributes legacy application output files and print data streams. Using the web as a document process automation platform, Report2Web connects employees, partners, and customers to a central and secure enterprise repository for all business-critical information. Any electronic document, including UNIX, Linux, IBM iSeries, mainframe, and client/server-generated output, as well as scanned images, can be stored, published, distributed, and archived with Report2Web.
Glenn Shapiro, VP of IT at USAIG, explained Report2Web is ideal for handling legacy application output files and print data streams. “But in 2013, we started working with Redwood to automate emailing these documents on a monthly schedule and allowing some recipients to access and send invoices to their email accounts whenever they wanted,” he said.
Redwood connected Shapiro with technology partner Brooks Internet Software, which develops RPM Remote Print Manager® ("RPM") virtual printer software, in use by over 100 joint customers. “Our primary computing platform is an IBM mainframe, and that’s managed by our parent company. Working with that IT group, we installed RPM in a sandboxed testing environment to make sure it would work like we wanted, without disrupting any other applications,” said Shapiro. “We sent a few virtual printer jobs through the queue, did a few tests, and changed a few settings on Report2Web. RPM worked and was up and running very quickly. It worked so well, we soon started using it to email reports and other documents in place of printing hard copies and mailing them, which was more time consuming and expensive overall.”
RPM includes the ability to transform a number of host formats into PDF; save multiple documents into a single document, including merging PDFs; print to multiple printers, send to a printer and save to disk, and send print jobs via email. RPM can also run an application on a print job, enabling virtually any integration required.
“I love this software. RPM processes virtual print jobs from Report2Web, generates digital PDFs, and automatically emails them to the right people. We use it for policy invoices, underwriters’ worksheets, and some monthly reports. It’s so much easier and faster than printing and mailing these documents,” he said. “RPM is reasonably priced, easy to use, includes a lot of features and functionality, and works really well in our existing IT environment.”
Shapiro also praised Brooks’ technical support. “When we decided to try to combine two different INI files for two customer profiles, we worked with Brooks’ support team, and they helped us set up to run one INI file for those monthly reports, just like we wanted. Support was excellent,” he said.