Shedding its image of a brick-and-mortar organisation, the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is all set venture into the digital era.
The corporation is close to signing a Rs 1,100 crore (Rs 11 billion) Electronic Data Management System (EDMS) contract with a consortium-led by global IT major Hewlett-Packard (HP) that will transfer it to the paperless world by 2010.
HP will lead a consortium of IT firms, including Mumbai-based Vakrangee Softwares for three-and-a-half year that would entail digitalization of its 20 crore (Rs billion) policies. The global IT major would also have to rollout LIC's EDMS initiative and computerize all its 2,048 branches.
The technical and commercial evaluation process has been completed, and a formal announcement would be made sometime later sources close to development said.
IT majors Wipro, Electronic Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and hardware major CMS Computers were the other bidders for the project.
When contacted LIC executives declined to comment on the contract. Under the deal, the consortium that wins the contract would have to install scanners to convert existing policies into digital format and archive it at a central server.
Each policy contains 20-30 sheets of paper, resulting in around 400 crore (Rs 4 billion) sheets that have to be scanned. The process is long-drawn and could take upto 3-3.5 years.
All the branches of the corporation would be connected to the server, allowing them to retrieve policies by providing the name and number of the account-holder.
EDMS will enable policyholders to take loans on their policy from any LIC branch, obtain survival benefits under money back policy, make changes in their policies from any LIC branch office. The receipts and payments from LIC will become location independent.
According to LIC executive director (IT) Swarna Prabha Sukumar, "At present, if a policyholder applies for a second policy, his previous policy particulars have to be the submitted to the concerned branch. EDMS will enable us to retrieve his documents from any branch office. Once LIC gets paperless the customer can avail of loan, make changes in the policy and all branches will be able to access to his documents."
"The scanning of 400 crore papers is expected to be completed by 2010. But with over 3 crore (Rs 30 million) policies added every year, around 9 crore (Rs 90 million) of dockets would have to be scanned in addition to the existing policies. This is not an easy task," she said.
