Chemical Bank

Chemical Financial Corporation (CFC) is the third largest bank holding company in Michigan. With assets of more than $3 billion, CFC operates 129 branch offices located throughout Michigan's Lower Peninsula. It provides a full range of commercial and consumer banking products and services that include cash management and personal investment services, mutual funds, annuities, credit life, title and insurance products.

Like other banks, CFC uses signature cards when customers sign up for accounts. CFC gathers an average of about 200 signature cards every day from its branch offices. Over the years CFC started building up a backlog of signature cards. By 2008, CFC had accumulated more than 300,000 signature cards and maintained six full-time employees who were responsible for finding cards, photocopying them, faxing photocopies to branches requesting a copy, and then returning the originals to the proper file locations.

It was a cumbersome process that took at least 15 minutes per card—and sometimes longer if a card had been misplaced. Bank management felt that the manual, paper-based process for storing and retrieving the signature cards was outdated, and wanted to find a better solution that could speed up the process and reduce the amount of manual labor required to access the signature cards.

CFC worked with RCM Technologies to create an elegant solution for the signature card challenge. The solution includes products from KnowledgeLake, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. CFC and RCM Technologies created a document management system for the signature cards using KnowledgeLake Capture Server, KnowledgeLake Capture and KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint. The three products are part of KnowledgeLake’s suite of document imaging, document capture, and workflow products and solutions designed to work with Microsoft SharePoint technologies.

RCM Technologies first created a SharePoint Server-based system using two load-balanced front-end Web servers, one application server, and two SQL 2005 database servers in a failover cluster configuration. All servers run on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition operating system.

The solution also includes four Fujitsu fi-6230 scanners to scan the cards. Using KnowledgeLake Capture and KnowledgeLake Imaging for SharePoint, the bank began the process of capturing signature cards each day; the bank currently averages about 4,000 scanned daily. Four scan operators were involved in the project. As the cards were scanned, KnowledgeLake Capture software on the scan computer controlled the metadata population by matching a key field to information contained in a SQL Server database. The completed scans are housed on a dedicated SharePoint Server used for an intranet that is available in every CFC branch. RCM Technologies used KnowledgeLake search templates to establish common types of metadata searches to be used by CFC employees.

The document management solution for the signature cards took six weeks to deploy and went online in late January 2009.

Using the KnowledgeLake products in combination with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helped Chemical Financial Corporation resolve the issue of handling large numbers of paper signature cards. The solution helped CFC quickly enter tens of thousands of signature cards into the new electronic system. The technology enables fast, easy retrieval by bank branch employees of signature cards over the intranet, eliminating the need for staff members to manually retrieve paper cards at a central location. And at the bank branches, the speed and convenience of the solution helps CFC employees deliver even better customer service.

Rapid Input of Documents Into System

The solution allowed two bank employees to upload as many as 4,000 cards daily into the intranet-based system, enabling the bank to digitize more than 263,000 signature files in about three months.

“Images are perfected on the first scan, and paper-based characteristics such as highlighter marks and colored paper all scan into an image that is clear and precise,” says Gary Richardson, Chief Information Officer for Chemical Financial Corporation.

He notes that the KnowledgeLake software also allows bank employees to index batches of document images using a sophisticated indexing interface that is part of KnowledgeLake Capture Server.

"With the KnowledgeLake technology, document entry happens fast and accurately with excellent image quality.”

Cutting Retrieval Time from Minutes to Seconds

The templates provided by the KnowledgeLake software enable fast, easy searches of signature cards by bank employees. Employees can typically locate and display signature cards on the SharePoint Server-based intranet in about 15 seconds, getting the same information that used to take a minimum of 15 minutes. The KnowledgeLake software accomplishes this speed in part by using configurations defined on the SharePoint Server system to perform database lookups using account numbers, Social Security numbers, or account holder names.

“With the KnowledgeLake and SharePoint technologies, signature cards are now located and displayed in seconds on the intranet, allowing branch business transactions to occur quickly and efficiently,” says Richardson.

Enhanced Customer Service

With the document management solution in place, CFC has transformed a routine but time-consuming process into an efficient document management system. That results in enhanced customer service and a reduction in resources needed to manage signature cards.

“The solution helps us streamline a core business process,” Richardson says, “resulting in better customer service and increased productivity for branch employees.”