System Components 23 Branches 4 Regional Processing Centers 409 Imaging and Workflow Users 12 Imaging and Workflow Servers 16 High-Speed Scanners 9 Distributed Database Servers 8 Distributed Archive Jukeboxes 1 Tightly Connected Imaging and Workflow Enterprise Scan Volume 100,000 Pages Per Day 2,000,000 Pages Per Month

Due to the absolutely enormous transaction volumes handled daily by AIG Nan Shan Life, it was impossible to implement a centralized server architecture and still achieve the required user response times out at their giant processing centers (the bandwidth that would be required to achieve adequate performance at the processing centers with a centralized server architecture would send costs through the roof.)  It is these enormous transaction volumes that set AIG Nan Shan Life apart from the rest, and which required us to embark on a much more sophisticated architecture (see the diagram above.) 

The architecture implemented at AIG Nan Shan Life is a decentralized server architecture, designed and deployed whereby Imaging & Workflow server farms were set-up at each of the four processing centers.  In addition to these extremely powerful, multi-server imaging and workflow domains, we also deployed high-capacity optical jukeboxes to each regional center.  With this architecture in place, when users retrieve images at a processing center, the images do not have to come across the wide-area-network from a central server, but instead, are retrieved at local-area-network speeds.  The results are sub-second image retrieval times without the need to upgrade the WAN lines to monstrously expensive and cost prohibitive bandwidths.  The imaging and workflow platform selected by AIG Nan Shan Life was designed specifically with this distributed architecture in mind, and allows each of the four imaging and workflow server farms, and distributed optical jukebox repositories, to interact and function as a single, tightly integrated imaging & workflow system.  For example, if a user in the Northern Regional Processing Center needs to view an image that resides in another processing center, the fact that the image currently  resides on a different domain server, or a different processing center jukebox, is completely transparent to the user!   The imaging & workflow platform handles this seamlessly with complete security and data integrity.

The most recent phase of the project included the centralization of all file warehouses throughout Taiwan into two centralized facilities.  When users need to access the old policy file documents, they send electronic requests to the centralized facilities where the files are then immediately scanned, routed to the appropriate processing center domain, and sent to the users.  All file movement is now electronic - from the new documents received at the branches to the historical files in the file warehouses.