A Quest for Information leads Shelter Insurance to Avanti Slingshot

The Shelter Insurance® group of companies is a leader in the insurance industry, providing customers with exceptional insurance. Since opening their doors in 1946, Shelter Insurance has become one of the most successful and financially sound regional insurance groups in the country. In 1986, they introduced an international reinsurance operation, specializing in reinsuring property around the world. Over the years, they have transformed from a small company providing Missourians affordable car insurance into a leading corporation offering a variety of insurance products in 17 states.

Shelter Insurance Companies include Shelter Mutual Insurance, Shelter General Insurance, Shelter Life Insurance, and Shelter Reinsurance Company, as well as Haulers Insurance Company Inc. These are serviced by approximately 2,000 employees throughout their operating area.

Shelter Insurance’s commitment to their customers, employees, and community is reflected in its full-service Document Services group located in Columbia, Missouri, which offers both offset and digital services. The shop assists the advertising department with supplying agents the tools they need to be successful while ensuring consistency of Shelter's brand identity. The Shelter Insurance Document Services plant produces more than 9,000 printing projects annually including postcards, folders, business cards, brochures, stationery, direct-mail, postcards, booklets, banners and much more.

In addition to supporting its nearly 2000 agents across 17 states, 15% of the shop’s work comes from servicing external customers and has developed a healthy “word of mouth” reputation. They are an in-plant that behaves like a commercial shop.

The Quest for Information

One of the biggest challenges facing Shelter Insurance’s Document Services group was gaining true insight into overall costs, not just tangible consumables like ink and paper.

“We needed a very clear picture of what it was costing us to do our work,” stated Linda Winn, Manager – Document Services. “Keeping all the information in an excel spreadsheet is NO way to track the actual time it took to do our particular jobs”.

The majority of costs were based on paper. There was little to no insight on the cost of inks, solvents and, most importantly, run time. To continue offering competitive pricing for both their internal and external customers, the Document Services group at Shelter Insurance recognized that they needed to take control of their workflow and maximize productivity.

The team consists of 28 people: 7 in the printing department, 7 graphic designers and 14 document specialists. There was little in place to properly track time and resources. They viewed themselves as an internal print shop – existing merely as a service to agents. Outside printing was seen as just an “extra”. To be profitable, they needed to examine efficiencies and decide if it was time to start charging for “bricks and mortar”.

Avanti had the answers

The Document Services group needed answers in order to make crucial business decisions and began looking for a solution. After investigating several different companies, Shelter Insurance’s Document Services group settled on Avanti Slingshot (Booth 651). As Winn puts it: “What sold us on Avanti was the modular aspect. With all the other systems, you are forced to get the ‘whole enchilada’…including whole enchilada price tags! The more we looked at Avanti, the more we realized ‘it just made sense’”.

Shelter Insurance purchased several Avanti Slingshot modules including: Job manager; estimating; Order entry/job costing; Shipping; Milestone Scheduling; Shop Floor Data Collection; Inventory Management; Invoicing for outside work and Custom chargeback to properly bill inside work, and Reporting. Implementation began in March of 2013 and 4 months later, Avanti Slingshot was live.

Because Shelter Insurance already had a web-to-print storefront, Avanti was able to quickly integrate Avanti Slingshot within it. Shelter Insurance was thrilled with the ease of implementation, particularly given the level of tailoring of the system required to ensure that all aspects of the business, both internal and external, were integrated.

“We knew it would be a challenge for the team. Some of the employees have been with the company for 30 to 40 years,” explained Winn. “They never had to track their time before. Now it’s just second nature.”

Shelter Insurance was thrilled with how seamlessly Avanti was able to be integrated within their environment. The management team quickly realized that in order for the company to truly benefit from Avanti Slingshot, it needed to become part of everyone’s day-to-day process and, as such, took a strong stance to ensure overall compliance. They even made it part of the team’s performance goals. The learning curve was minimal. Through peer support and encouragement, it didn’t take long to learn the system and, in less than 3 months, it’s now second nature and part of the team’s daily routine.

“This whole process was very eye-opening for us,” says Winn. “We were forced to ask ourselves some really tough questions. Now we have efficiencies in place. We have implemented workflows. It was a huge AHA moment!”