How Funeral Directors Life Automated Handwritten Contracts and Saved $1M Annually
Summary:
Funeral Directors Life automated handwritten contract processing using Grooper’s handwriting recognition.
As a result:
- 80% of handwritten data was captured automatically
- Manual entry time dropped from 8 minutes to 2 minutes per contract
- Over 1,900 hours of manual work were eliminated annually
- The company avoided $1M+ in yearly operational costs
Funeral Directors Life (FDL) has a simple mission: make the lives of funeral directors easier with their many customer service solutions, including technology solutions. If FDL could simplify the everyday tasks of funeral director staff, then funeral homes can spend more time on helping families in need, which grows their businesses.
So FDL is continually looking for ways to offer better customer service, reduce errors, and cause more funeral homes to use their solutions.
The Challenge: The Bottleneck of Handwritten Contract Processing
One area that FDL focused on is automating their contract processing. FDL’s integration with funeral home case management software, Passare, enables funeral homes to manage every family’s contract, even down to line-item information.
All data from digital contracts is easily integrated into Passare. But FDL was relying on manual data entry for the handwritten contracts, which make up about 25% of all their contracts.
This reliance on manual data entry created several compounding business problems:
- Severe Time Constraints: Before Grooper AI, it took FDL staff about eight minutes to manually type in data from one handwritten contract into the insurance administration software.
- Minimal data: FDL staff only had time to key in totals, and not line items, off handwritten contracts. This prevented funeral homes from obtaining a comprehensive, itemized view of their business data.
- Increased Error Rate: By manually keying in data, there is a higher chance of errors and incorrect contract data in Passare.
- More time: If funeral home staff wanted a full understanding of handwritten contracts, they were forced to key in the line-item data into Passare.
- Inconsistent software experience: Funeral home staff had an inconsistent experience in Passare, based on whether the contract was digital or handwritten.
To solve these problems, Kyle Swearingen, VP of Development for FDL, sought an enterprise automation solution capable of highly accurate handwriting recognition.
The Solution: Selecting Grooper for Advanced Handwriting Recognition
Swearingen evaluated four competing Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platforms and was on the verge of signing with another vendor when he discovered Grooper at a technology conference.
FDL selected Grooper based on a few critical structural differentiators:
- AI Handwriting Recognition Capabilities: Grooper successfully extracted noisy, irregular handwriting where other engines struggled.
- Native Hyland OnBase Integration: Grooper offered direct data exporting back into OnBase, allowing large-scale data organization that was significantly harder to achieve with other software alternatives.
- Deployment Flexibility: Grooper’s web-browser user interface and secure on-premise capabilities granted FDL complete administrative control over their deployment architecture.
“Grooper being on-prem and web-based makes it much easier to deploy. And I just have more control over what I want to do with Grooper. There were a million different reasons why we picked Grooper.”
– Kyle Swearingen, VP of Development, FDL
Technical Implementation: Building the Automation Pipeline
After completing technical training at Grooper University, Swearingen and his development team built a multi-layered, integrated data automation pipeline:
- Step 1: Data Extraction – Grooper automatically scans and extracts data fields from physical, handwritten contracts.
- Step 2: Workflow Routing – Hyland OnBase consumes the extracted data assets to systematically trigger downstream processing tasks.
- Step 3: Robotic Process Automation – An RPA bot takes the validated data fields and automatically inputs them directly into the core insurance administration system.
To continuously monitor data accuracy and optimize OCR configuration settings, FDL utilized WorkView, native Reporting Dashboards, and the Grooper API to audit automated data captures against legacy manual entries.
Swearingen was then able to learn how much data FDL had entered manually, check accuracy, and optimize OCR handwriting configuration.
The Outcome: Reclaiming Millions in Overhead and Labor Hours
From the first day of deployment, Grooper’s AI natively recognized 80% of all handwritten contract data, reducing the manual validation requirement for the FDL New Business Team to just 20%.
FDL Performance Metrics Comparison:
Valuable Time Saved for Thousands of Customers
FDL is now saving their funeral homes about 10 to 20 minutes of painstaking work for each funeral. Also, the customer experience in Passare is now consistent, as funeral homes have all data available whether it was a handwritten or digital contract.
“This allows them to focus on the family in need and not on the monotonous data entry,” said Swearingen. “They get to do what they do best, serve the families in need.”
Grooper’s handwriting recognition has proven to be a valuable component in this improvement.
“The document capture side of things can be a nightmare to solve because I have 20 different types of documents with a lot of handwriting on them. But we’re reducing the time it takes to key a contract, and we’re capturing more data. Grooper’s a huge time saver,” said Swearingen.
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