Optical storage is helping the world's largest pension system deliver any of 60 million archived images in 10 to 15 seconds to any of over 2,500 customer service representatives and processing unit associates throughout the company. The result is that the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF) can provide immediate answers to inquiries and process customer service requests faster and more efficiently.
The optical storage system is an integrated part of an enterprise imaging system that automates the flow of documents within the company. This digital document archive saves a significant amount of time that was previously spent delivering and filing paper documents. A critical advantage of the optical storage system is that it provides a permanent record of critical documents because, unlike hard disk or magnetic tape storage, optical storage cannot be accidentally erased. "Optical storage has helped us improve customer service while further enhancing security for critical customer records," says Larry Wischerth, director of Imaging Operations and Administration.
TIAA-CREF is a leading, national provider of financial services and is the premier pension system for people employed in education and research in the US. Its nationwide, portable pension system is one of the largest in the world, based on assets under management of $300 billion. The system serves over two million participants and 9,500 institutions. As a shareholder in over 4,800 companies (3,300 domestic, 1,500 foreign) traded on domestic and foreign stock exchanges, CREF is one of Wall Street's more prominent institutional investors. Today, the CREF Stock Account is one of the largest managed equity funds in the world. TIAA-CREF also serves as program manager for more state-sponsored college savings trusts than any other company.
Problems with Microfilm Jackets
Fund managers deal with huge numbers of paper documents including enrollment applications, beneficiary changes, benefit starting requests and claim forms. Record storage and security is therefore a top priority. In the past, microfilm jackets were used as the primary archiving system. But the problem with this approach was the amount of time and effort required to update, handle the jackets and locate particular jacket files. Associates had to first request a copy of the correct jacket, which could take as long as 24 hours to deliver. And in order to use the jackets, employees had to have access to microfilm readers.
To overcome these problems, TIAA-CREF invested in an enterprise-wide imaging system that captures images from a variety of different sources including nearly all incoming and outgoing paper documents such as forms, letters and faxes. The imaging system was designed for the primary goal of processing customer requests in a more efficient manner. Each document is converted to an electronic file and routed throughout the company using electronic workflow. The workflow process speeds the delivery of documents and makes it possible to use routing schemes that automatically make documents available to specialists who are best trained to handle them.
Need for Permanent Archival
The move from microfilm to imaging raised the issue of providing a permanent document archive. As a pension provider, TIAA-CREF must provide secure document storage over a long period of time. Managers recognized that hard disk storage is relatively fast but doesn't provide the required level of permanency. Magnetic tape is also not a permanent media because tapes can deteriorate as decades pass. Therefore, managers decided that optical disk storage provided the best permanent storage option. An additional advantage of optical storage is that access times are fast enough to provide online data retrieval for customer service representatives and other employees. ·
"We looked at a wide range of optical storage systems," Wischerth adds. "Most of them did not provide the data storage capacity, access time or transfer rate that we needed to archive our enormous volume of records and serve them up to customer service representatives without major delays. We selected LF4100 drives from Plasmon, Colorado Springs, Colorado, because these drives used 5.6 GB platters, which were the largest in the industry and used two read/write heads, putting the entire platter online."
Since those drives were installed, Plasmon has introduced LF6100 and LF6600 drives, which use 12 GB platters while maintaining backward compatibility with the previous 5.6 GB drives. TIAA-CREF has migrated to the new 6000 series drives, although it still uses some 5.6 GB drives as well as all of the earlier disks. The 100 millisecond average access time and 10 Mbps burst and 2.7 Mbps sustained transfer rates offered by these drives are the highest in the industry. Most recently, Plasmon has released its new 30 GB drives. The 100 millisecond average access time and 10 Mbps burst and 2.7 Mbps sustained transfer rates offered by these drives were the highest in the industry. Most recently, Plasmon has released its new fourth generation 30 GB drives, which more than doubled the capacity and transfer rates of the previous generation.
Optical Storage Systems
TIAA-CREF currently has 35 optical storage systems. Images are maintained on hard disk storage and also archived to the optical storage system. When a user requests one of these recent images, it is retrieved from a disk. After a period of time, the image is erased from the disk drive, and further retrieval requests are automatically directed to optical storage. The average size of the image is 35 KB, and the total image inventory occupies several terabytes. "The use of optical disk storage provides us with the archival security that we require," Wischerth notes. "The images are burned permanently into the surface of the disk and can't be erased or changed. Optical solutions are the most durable of any removable storage media. The glass disks have a minimum life of 30 years, so we know our data will be there when we need it. Plasmon is continually delivering higher storage capacity while remaining backwardly compatible with existing media. This means we can migrate to the latest technology without having to worry about still reading our existing data."
Improving Productivity and Customer Service
The combination of the imaging system and optical disk storage has also substantially improved productivity of TIAA-CREF associates. Customer service representatives can access documents over the network immediately to answer a customer question. The data security and fast response time provided by the optical disk storage also contribute to the productivity improvements that have been achieved through the implementation of the imaging and workflow systems.
"All in all, optical storage is the ideal solution for archiving critical financial documents," Wischerth explains. "The fall in the price of disk storage has made it possible to substantially increase the volume of information that we maintain on disk. This has reduced retrieval time but not eliminated or even reduced the need for optical disk storage. Optical storage will continue to provide a permanent backup as well as a reasonably fast way to provide online data retrieval. The nature of the retirement business means that long-term data security is one of the most important aspects of our business. Optical storage meets that need for us."
Austin McKenzie is a staff writer for "document." For additional information regarding Plasmon IDE, you can visit the Web site at www.plasmon.com.
