Merchant Navy Pensions Scraps Microfiche For LAVA Systems Solution

LAVA s totally integrated document management, workflow and high-volume publishing solution is just what Merchant Navy Pensions needs to handle growth

Toronto, ON - 1998-06-09 - LAVA Systems Inc. (TSE:LVA) today announced that Merchant Navy Pensions Administration Limited of Leatherhead, Surrey, UK, had signed a contract for an extensive pension administrations document and workflow management system, worth approximately £250,000 ($CDN 600,000). Existing records on microfiche will be scanned into LAVA s robust, scaleable electronic document repository, as will all new paper documents handled by Merchant Navy Pensions. The documents relate to the pension administration products that the firm provides for more than 150,000 customers at the firm s 18 pension fund clients. Links between LAVA s solution and a PMS6000 pension administration system from Watson Wyatt will further increase efficiency and productivity.

LAVA gives us the ability to link tasks together and bring them through a workflow with improved speed and accuracy. The motivation is to increase productivity and keep our costs down, and I believe that workflow with links to EDM resources will help us accomplish our goals, said Mark Adamson, Operations Director, Merchant Navy Pensions. The bottom line is that, as a business, we re continually expanding our client base in a responsible, controlled manner. We firmly believe that the purchase of LAVA will assist us in achieving this objective without a significant increase in our cost base and that we ll get a return on this investment within three years.

Our knowledge of the market and willingness to work closely with Merchant Navy to create a pension administration solution was a major factor in our win, which was achieved against several high-profile, big-name competitors, said Robert Terry, Chief Operating Officer of LAVA Systems. We re confident that this contract award will be followed by additional opportunities for our pension fund application in that vertical insurance market, particularly among firms with the PMS6000 solution in place.

Our present pension administration system requires human intervention that LAVA can reduce significantly. LAVA also provides automatic linkage across systems, which is a very important capability, said Adamson. Typically, today a piece of paper comes into our central post department and it requires someone to get the microfiche, consider what the task is, set it up on the computer and move it through the system, with an action at the end, such as a payment to a pension fund member. And that needs a manual kickoff to flow it into our accounting system. With LAVA these systems will be totally integrated, requiring information to be entered into one place only, providing significant business benefits."

Regarding the output correspondence and even cheques Merchant Navy will be using LAVA IntelliDocs to provide a smoother, more controlled, user-friendly and error-free document-printing environment, according to Merchant Navy.

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