Penn National Insurance Selects Exstream Software's Dialogue To Reduce Costs and Speed Time to Market with Critical Business Documents

Business Wire, August 4, 2005

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Exstream Software, Inc. announced today that its Dialogue software has been selected by Penn National Insurance, a leading regional insurer providing property-casualty insurance throughout nine Mid-Atlantic States. The company selected Dialogue to provide a single comprehensive infrastructure for its batch and real-time document applications. Dialogue's robust capabilities are making it possible for Penn National Insurance to automate the management of policyholder and agent communications. With Dialogue, the company is able to produce critical, client-specific insurance documents in real time and deliver them to underwriters for approval and agents for review, significantly speeding time to market. Additionally, Dialogue is facilitating archival needs with its ability to output documents into TIFF format for import into the company's imaging system. Penn National Insurance reports that eliminating the need to manually scan and index images for archival has resulted in substantial labor and paper savings.

Key drivers in the selection of Dialogue were its innovative design environment for speeding time to market; its ability to process an unlimited number of data input files simultaneously; output multiple file formats simultaneously (i.e. TIFF, PDF, and PostScript); generate documents in real time for online viewing; and its high performance engine. Penn National Insurance is using Dialogue's Real-time capabilities to send its underwriters in various states policy worksheets for review and approval online. The underwriter is then able to remotely drive the production process by authorizing the policy to be printed only after it has been approved. Dialogue's Real-time engine makes it possible to dynamically name the files with the individual policy number and time stamp, and run different files and several production engines at the same time--something not possible in a batch environment.

"We are extremely impressed with the speed in which we can design documents using Dialogue, and how fast the production engine creates the finished product," said Timothy Caskey, senior systems analyst for Penn National Insurance. "We are so enthused with the time savings and cost reduction that we are now looking at every department to study how they are creating documents to determine whether it makes sense to convert those documents to Dialogue. For example, plans are in the works to print our Explanation of Benefits (EOB) and vendor payment check in one print stream so they can be mailed in a single envelope. This will eliminate the need to manually match the EOB with the check and provides additional savings on postage. Because of opportunities like this, we want to use the software as much as we can."

Going forward, Penn National Insurance will take advantage of Dialogue's intuitive design environment to push the creation of static insurance documents out to its administrative staff for additional timesavings. The company also plans to create an environment for its agents where, similar to its underwriters, they can view documents online and print them locally resulting in significant projected savings in warehousing, printing, paper and postage costs.

"We are pleased that Dialogue is providing Penn National Insurance the ability to produce documents in real time, allowing them to achieve faster time to market and significant cost savings," said Michael Charest, vice president, insurance solutions for Exstream. "Penn National Insurance's innovative use of Dialogue is bringing internal benefits that will benefit its customers as well."

About Penn National Insurance

Penn National Insurance provides property and casualty insurance to businesses and individuals through a network of independent agents in nine eastern/mid-Atlantic states. The company ranks among the top 10 percent out of more than 1,000 national competitors, based on premium volume. Computerworld has awarded the company the Best Places to Work in IT award in 2004 and 2005.

About Exstream Software

Headquartered in Lexington, KY, Exstream Software helps businesses around the world connect with their customers through higher quality, fully personalized customer communications delivered by mail, email and the Internet. Companies in the financial services, insurance, service provider, telecommunications, utilities and other industries benefit from as much as 85 percent faster time to market, up to 80 percent reduced costs and increased revenue through improved customer retention.

For more information about Exstream Software and its market-leading Dialogue and AFP Studio technology, visit www.exstream.com, or contact Exstream at 859-296-0600 or info@exstream.com.

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