The ANWB is able to settle Europe-wide incidents quickly and effi ciently with the help of Global360 image and process manager.

The ANWB (Royal Dutch Touring Club) has a membership of some 3.5 million people, offering them a range of travel related services at home and abroad. Members of the Touring Club can also join its Roadside Assistance Service. Core coverage for this service provides help to members who have problems with their car or motorcycle on the road within the Netherlands.

By arranging additional cover, membership of the Road Patrol Service can be extended to cover travel abroad. Every year, the Royal Dutch Touring Club Roadside Assistance Service helps many tens of thousands of its members who become in critical need of assistance while on holiday.

During the peak season in July and August, approximately 350 administrative staff work hard round the clock to help holidaymakers in distress, to help them on their way again. These administrators work out of the Touring Club’s Emergency Center in The Hague, as well as in Emergency Centers in the Club’s regional offices, including Athens, Barcelona, Benidorm, Lyon, Milan, and Munich, which are set up to offer local on-site help. Every incident generates documents containing information relevant to that incident, and these need to be processed as quickly as possible.

With increasing numbers of members taking advantage of the pan-Europe Roadside Assistance coverage, the number of people seeking help has grown significantly over the past two decades, generating increasing numbers of documents and files. In addition, even in countries where there is a local Royal Dutch Touring Club office, many holidaymakers automatically contact the main EmergencyCenter in The Hague when they need help, mainly because they are under the misapprehension that this is the only office to provide help in their own language.

So, a great deal of vital information about an incident is often received in The Hague and this needs to be relayed as quickly as possible to the appropriate regional office, so that the incident can be resolved on-site.

By the mid-1990s, the increasing volumes of paperwork, as well as the need to share large volumes of information between the different sites, prompted the Royal Dutch Touring Club to reassess its approach to document management for its Roadside Assistance Service.

The organization was looking for an electronic solution which would allow fast sharing of information between all its Emergency Centres, Europe-wide.

The new solution also needed to integrate with the Club’s incident registration system. This records key information such as the name and address of the person requesting assistance, their Club membership number, the date of the incident and the nature of the incident.

In 1995, on the advice of Global 360 system integrator and partner Atos Origin Nederland, the Royal Dutch Touring Club selected Global 360 Image and Process Manager. “We recommended Global 360’s document imaging and workflow system because it communicates well between The Hague and the regional offices in other countries, without requiring any technical adjustments,” explains Pieter Clement of Atos Origin Business Solutions, who is on a secondment to the Royal Dutch Touring Club and is responsible for the Club’s Global 360 system.

Atos Origin has built up years of experience with Global 360 products, and recently won Global 360’s 2001 Partner Award Benelux, for outstanding achievement. Implemented, maintained, and managed with the help of Atos Origin, the Global 360 Image and Process solution manages the flow of documents that each Roadside Assistance incident generates, and also archives the documents on a central jukebox in The Hague.

As soon as a document is created, its contents are available to be viewed on-line by everyone in the assistance network, right across Europe. “Thanks to Global 360, the content of each file is visible and accessible to all service staff as soon as it is made. This helps us to settle incidents quickly,” says Pieter Clement. Currently, the Royal Dutch Touring Club’s Global 360 Image and Process system manages four different document flows. The first consists of documents generated by the Club itself, such as letters to hospitals and auto repair shops involved in resolving the incident. These are created within the Global 360 system.

The second document flow consists of faxes sent to the Club by the emergency services and other organizations. Originally, these faxes were scanned into the Global 360 system. But with continuing Global 360 developments, the faxes are now digitally downloaded directly into the appropriate incident file, via a PC. This reduces the scanning workload and saves considerable time.

The third document flow consists of incoming mail scanned into the Global 360 system, comprising documents and letters received by post. And the fourth flow comprises all documents relating to the financial settlement of an incident: scanned in or created within the system, as necessary.

Over the years, the volume of documents has continued to grow, and in 2001, the Global 360 system routed a massive 117,820 letters, 17,248 faxes and 72,087 settlement-related documents into the right workflows. Each file stays open until it has been fully settled financially, and is then archived for a further 5 years. The Global 360 solution gives service staff at the Emergency Centers across Europe the support they need to provide assistance quickly and efficiently.

“The Global 360 solution is a great system. We’ve received very positive feedback on it from our EmergencyCenter staff ,” confirms Yvonne Hoogers, who is Application Development Manager within the Royal Dutch Touring Club’s Assistance Information Management and Infrastructure Department. Of particular importance is the system’s ability to identify documents by incident.

“The Global 360 system makes it possible to put the focus on an incident rather than a document, which increases the efficiency of the workflow processes even further,” says Pieter Clement.

Future focus for the Club is to maintain service excellence while at the same time reducing costs. As part of this exercise, the Club decided to migrate all its systems to Windows 2000, including its Global 360 solution.

There are also plans to capitalize on the additional intelligence offered by the Global 360 solution: for example to allow increasing numbers of staff to index documents, and also to give staff valuable feedback on fax traffic and status.

The Global 360 solution is one of the key mission-critical Information and Communication Technology systems that the Touring Club relies on to ensure a highly efficient and fast service to its members abroad. “In our department 60 people work to develop, maintain, manage, and improve customer-friendly systems and applications so that they support our service personnel in effectively settling each incident in a structured yet flexible way,” explains Yvonne Hoogers.

The full scalability and high functionality of Global 360 Image and Process360 are vital for the Royal Dutch Touring Club. “We need to make sure that our systems and applications can keep up with the constantly growing number of incidents.

In 2001, the number of incidents rose again: by 7 percent. And the growth in the number of requests for assistance shows a high appreciation of how effectively we carry out this part of our core business,” concludes Yvonne Hoogers.

Summary

Application

Providing Europe-wide emergency center assistance staff with direct real time access to all the documents relating to particular incidents notified to the Royal Dutch Touring Club’s Roadside Assistance Service; supporting the assistance staff in ensuring fast resolution of incidents; allowing multiple-user access to documents; preventing documents from being mislaid; managing and controlling document flows and workflows; integration with the Club’s incident registration system.

Global 360 Solution

Global 360 Image and Process360 to scan in, digitize, index and archive tens of thousands of incoming and outgoing faxes, letters and other documents; to digitally integrate fax message content with existing digital fi les; to provide fast on-screen access to these documents Europe-wide.

Number of Users

350 users in the July/August peak season.

Platform

Microsoft® Windows 2000

Global 360 Solutions Provider

Atos Origin Nederland