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For business reports and other publications the Munich-based company Munich Re relies on the security and precision of WoodWing’s Enterprise.

Münchener Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft Aktiengesellschaft in München, is the holding company of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest enterprises in the field of reinsurance, primary insurance and asset management.

Ever since its founding in 1880, it has been a pioneer in reinsurance, with an expertise built on nearly 130 years of business experience and the knowledge of 44,000 employees. The company’s main office is located in Munich, with numerous branches around the globe.

Oil platforms and satellite technology
The company has a rich heritage and is active in almost every type of insurance. In addition it offers personal, transportation, aviation, fire and technical insurances. Munich Re reinsures, for example, the risks of oil platforms, satellite technology and natural catastrophes.

With its subsidiary ERGO, covering all types of personal insurances with the D.A.S., Victoria and Hamburg-Mannheimer brands, and its travel insurance subsidiary Europäische Reiseversicherung, it is at the top of primary insurances in Germany. Furthermore, it offers asset management and investment funds services.

Extreme correction expenses
Because Munich Re is listed at the stock exchange, it has to publish annual and quarterly reports. These contain detailed financial information, clarify business developments and present the entire Munich Re product range and its mission statement: turning risk into value.

Production of these types of reports is a 'cardinal discipline' in corporate communication. Time pressure, extreme correction expenses and a complex information flow among many participants contribute to this. And because report information is relevant for stock values, it must be kept absolutely confidential until final publication.

Reducing proofing rounds
Munich Re was looking for a more efficient report production process and a higher workflow transparency, without making any sacrifices to information security. Therefore, the company decided in October 2006 to employ a dedicated publishing solution for its annual reports.

Until then, Munich Re created its annual reports and other publications in the usual way. Text manuscripts were prepared in Microsoft Word, tables in Excel, and the layout was created using QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Illustrator. Augustin Luginger, project manager at Munich Re, recalls: “Our basic requirements for a corporate publishing solution were: data security, saving time and costs, reducing proofing rounds, accountability of version changes and an elaborate but easy-to-manage system for roles and access rights.”

Compatibility and price
Munich Re extensively searched specialized media and spent ten months examining three publishing solutions in detail, using both in-house presentations and discussions with users. In the end, Enterprise beat its competitors on compatibility and price.

Internal prerequisites about the database also played a substantial role. Augustin Luginger describes the reasons for selecting Enterprise. “The use of a standard database (Oracle) was decisive, compared with a competitor’s proprietary solution. Another solution soon left the race because of cost considerations.”

High data security standard
Installation and implementation of Enterprise started at the end of August 2007. Within one month, about 50 seats for InCopy and InDesign were installed in the concurrent user model.

Enterprise implementation took place according to the high security standards at Munich Re, protecting all sensitive data, computers and networks. Enterprise was submitted to several security tests, carried out by the company’s own competence center in Toronto. Enterprise offers a very high security standard, but it was optimized even further during these tests. The flexibility of Enterprise allowed for a straightforward gradual adjustment to the required security standards. Despite these requirements and the decentralized cooperation of the parties involved in Munich, Toronto and Hamburg, this early installation phase could be completed successfully within a short time. “Installation at Munich Re was complex due to our high security standards, but intensive teamwork between our IT staff and system integrator ProPublish AG from Hamburg ensured a smooth implementation,” Augustin Luginger explains.

Workflow definition
During the second phase, the publishing platform was customized. First of all, a workflow was defined, during a workshop by ProPublish AG. To this end, work procedure sequences were identified in the creation process, e.g. for layout and article production, specifying how these should be implemented by Enterprise in the future. After that, training sessions for the future users were arranged.
At the end of September 2007, Enterprise set off with the quarterly report 3/2007. As the production process is similar to an annual report, this quarterly report was more or less the pilot project.

Six weeks
Augustin Luginger justifies this decision: “We deliberately selected a business-critical project instead of an uncomplicated publication, in order to generate enough attention from all concerned, which is essential during the introduction of such a comprehensive change. In this way we could better estimate the expenses for our forthcoming annual report.” The finished quarterly report 3/2007 appeared on November 5, 2007, six weeks after installation of Enterprise.

The workflow for annual and quarterly report production is now as follows. Employees of the Group Reporting and Reinsurance Accounting departments at Munich Re use data from the company’s SAP system. These are imported into Excel, where they are prepared for the report. Additional Enterprise tools, Smart Mover and Smart Styles, are used to connect SAP, Excel and InDesign. SAP data are prepared in Excel just as before, but they don’t have to be captured anymore in InDesign. Smart Mover is used to import the data into Enterprise, and Smart Styles provides automatic Excel table formatting in InDesign. This process automation saves time and prevents errors which could occur during transfer.

Elegant integration solution
Augustin Luginger was fully convinced of the integration capabilities of Enterprise. “Transfer from Excel to InDesign was a special requirement. Smart Mover and Smart Styles offered an elegant solution.”

In September 2008 Munich Re completely switched from Windows XP to Vista. Enterprise’s Vista compatibility enabled an easy change over internal IT staff, ProPublish AG and WoodWing.

Collaborative thinking
Despite the demanding technical conversion, the biggest benefit resulting from the introduction of Enterprise at Munich Re was seen by the users themselves, according to Augustin Luginger: “We have encouraged our employees to work and think collaboratively. All content providers now have a bigger individual responsibility regarding the more transparent production environment.”

The very first Enterprise-based publication already showed an increased productivity on all levels. Employees had simultaneous and unlimited access to content and layout, permitting Munich Re for the first time to produce their financial statements completely in-house. The absence of external interfaces allowed for increased data security during the production phase.

Lower costs, higher productivity
Enterprise also introduced a more structured production process. The publication always has an authenticated version state, excluding parallel processes. At any given time, anyone involved can request the status of individual parts of the quarterly and annual reports. In this way, the production process could be tightened significantly. Augustin Luginger mentions even more advantages: “With Enterprise, we could lower production costs while clearly increasing productivity. And we were very pleased to discover that operating Enterprise was even easier than expected.”'

The successful financial statement production prompted conversion of 'Knowledge in dialogue' (a customer seminar brochure in six languages), and 'Schadenspiegel', appearing for more than five decades in five languages. Both are now produced using Enterprise, and more projects are on the way.

High acceptance
To further expand Enterprise at Munich Re, the number of users will soon be increased. Content Station, the new application for media independent content management, will also be monitored closely. Content can be made available for different media simultaneously in one single step. Integration of SDL Trados translation software with Enterprise has been entered as a request at WoodWing, in order to link the multilingual brochures even closer into the production environment.

Augustin Luginger is very positive about system integrator ProPublish AG: “Their employee trainings were perfect. We experienced almost no problems while producing the first report. As a result, Enterprise acceptance among colleagues was very high from the start. The team is competent, reliable and customer focused.”
 

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