FEATURE 3148 – Site redesign  

You may have noticed some minor changes infiltrating Symbility.NET and various correspondence over the last few months. In late December of 2004, we officially changed our corporate image. Gone is the original Symbility company logo (the green and blue "discs") and green and blue as the corporate colours, replaced by orange and blue colours and the “moving pen computer” mobile claims logo which we have adopted as the company logo. All our published materials now include this new logo and colour scheme. The Symbility.NET web application has been completely redesigned as well to incorporate this branding...we hope you like the new look.

 

FEATURE 2397 – SMS Failsafe notifications  

FEATURE 136 – Subrooms 

This enhancement to Floorplan diagrams provides a quicker way to add items to multiple rooms at once and makes it easier to see the relationships between related rooms. By making one or more rooms "subrooms" of another (called the "master room") you "join" rooms together. To do this:

1. Select all rooms that are to be joined.

2. Tap-and-hold the "master" room (all other will be joined to it and designated "subrooms")

3. Tap Join Subrooms from the context menu.

Joined rooms act in some special ways:

• When you drop items on the master room or any subroom, the item will automatically be attached to the same surface in all joined rooms. Examples:

  • applying an item to the floor in the master room will also apply the item to the floor of all subrooms

  • applying the item to all walls of the master room will also apply the item to all walls of all subrooms

• When you drop an item onto a common wall (a wall shared by two or more subrooms or the master room), the item is automatically applied to both sides of the wall.

• The text "Subroom of [master room]" is appended to each subroom. It will display this way on the floorplan and in the estimate. All rooms are still individually listed on the estimate.

• Joined rooms move together—moving one moves them all.

• Changing the height of ceiling type of the master room will apply the same changes to all of its subrooms.

To "unjoin" subrooms, use the Join Subrooms command again for any subroom or the master room.

 

Note that a collection of rooms joined as subrooms is similar in some ways to rooms that are grouped, but there are differences between a group and subrooms:

• Rooms in a group can still be moved individually.

• The names of grouped rooms do not change.

• Grouped rooms appear together under a group heading on the estimate and are subtotalled.

To obtain the benefit of the last point, you can also group together joined subrooms.

 

FEATURE 989 – Additional estimate tools  

Several enhancements have been made to the estimate page. First, items and rooms can now be selected, which allows you to reposition them by dragging-and-dropping. Rooms can be moved to another location in the estimate and items can be moved to another position within the same room. There are also a new set of tools available to manipulate selected items right from the estimate page. You can now:

• attach a note or a photo to an item (and soon a voice clip)

• delete an item, note or photo

• cut, copy and paste items between rooms

• cut, copy and paste notes or photos between items

All these commands are available on the toolbar or within the context menu (tap-and-hold) for the object.

 

FEATURE 3030 – Ability to capture signatures electronically  

As part of our overall strategy to completely replace paper and provide a complete set of electronic tools for every aspect of the claim adjustment process, we have added the ability to capture signatures directly into an estimate with a pen-based computer. With the accompanying text "I authorize the work to be completed as detailed above." the estimate can now function as a work authorization form.

 

Note that the estimate must be marked as complete before a signature is captured. If the estimate is modified after a signature is captured, the signature is automatically removed (as the insured did not authorize the modifications just made). The original signature is archived and can be viewed with the historical estimate version in the estimate history section of the claim on Symbility.NET. You can capture another signature for the modified estimate.

 

You can also capture a digital signature as part of a manual journal entry. Note that once the signature is captured, the journal entry cannot be edited. Journal entries with signatures show a "pen" icon . Either double-tap the journal entry to view the signature, or you can switch the journal view to Full Entry View to view all signatures captured.

 

Signatures can also be captured directly into electronic forms (currently the Proof of Loss and Non-Waiver Agreement forms can capture signatures).

 

Once captured, digital signatures remain in the electronic estimate file and are accessible anywhere you view the claim.

 

FEATURE 2846 – Printing to PDF on Symbility.NET 

To complement the ability to print from mobile claims, we've added the ability to print from Symbility.NET as well. We chose to integrate a PDF engine directly into the system for two reasons: 1) instead of typical HTML-formatted printouts it provides a much cleaner, graphical layout with page breaks in all the right places, 2) it creates PDF files of the claim automatically, which many users would do anyway (this way you aren't required to purchase the Adobe Acrobat software).

 

When you "print to PDF" a claim, after choosing which pages to print and whether to print your soft letterhead or not, a single PDF file (with all pages you wanted to print) appears in a new window (assuming you have Adobe's free Acrobat Reader software installed). From there you can print the PDF (to your printer) or save the PDF to your hard drive.

 

FEATURE 1948 – Notes automatically added when changing applied height or wastage 

When an item's price includes wastage or you apply an item to less than the full height of a wall, it's useful to attach a note to the item explaining the reason for the changed price or quantity. Mobile claims will now automatically attach a note to the item for you when the wastage is greater than zero or you apply the item to less than the full wall height. 

 

FEATURE 2407 – Pager notifications 

We've added a fourth type of notification method that you can use if you would prefer to receive notifications via your pager. You must have an alphanumeric pager and your pager service must support email messages. Currently the following paging services are supported within Canada: Bell, Rogers, Telus and PageNet.

 

FEATURE 2951 – The Audit Report 

This is a very interesting feature that is best described as an automated estimate reviewing tool. An Audit Report is simply another version of an estimate report that highlights ("flags") all aspects of the estimate that violate a set of pre-established rules (the "audit rules"). The audit rules are established by the insurance company that originated the claim. For contractors, the audit report is a great way to catch mistakes and correct issues that the adjuster will find eventually, or add extra explanation to avoid questions that will be asked. For adjusters, it's a fantastic way to automate manual estimate reviews.

 

Although any number of rules can be created, and each rule can check just about anything within an estimate, by default the following five rules are used:

1. Items must exist in the pricing database. Items that cannot be located in the database will be flagged. For example if you change the item description or action of the item it becomes a new item not in the database.

2. Item properties (unit price components, wastage, etc.) must match what's in the item database. Items that have been changed in some way (other than the item description) after they were extracted from the database will be flagged.

3. LF, SF or SY quantities must match the values calculated for the room. If you manually change the quantity of an item instead of applying it to a surface the item will be flagged.

4. Every room must have at least one door, opening or missing wall. If there's no way to get into the room, the room is flagged! 

Audit reports are accessible from both mobile claims and Symbility.NET. Assignees can view an audit report for any of their own estimates, and claim originators can view an audit report for any of their own estimates as well as for any estimates created by assignees (as long as the estimates are complete).

 

To create an audit report in mobile claims, just double-click the Audit Report branch of the Claim Explorer. Mobile claims will generate a report for each estimate (select the estimate to show a report for from the drop-down box at the top). The default view (the Summary view) looks very similar to the estimate, showing all items in the estimate in the same order and flagging any items that violate audit rules by making them bold and red. To find out exactly what is wrong with a violation, click it—a detailed description will appear in a pop-up window. The Detail view shows only items that are in violation, but also shows the detailed description without needing to click the violation. 

 

Some violations can be automatically corrected for you using the AutoCorrect button. First select the violations that you want to have corrected, then press AutoCorrect—the estimate will be changed immediately and a new audit report will be generated, with those violations missing. Note that you must have ownership of the claim in mobile claims to use the AutoCorrect feature. If you're working with audit reports on Symbility.NET, then no one must have ownership of the claim.

 

On Symbility.NET, every audit report that has been created is listed in the claim explorer (along with its time and date stamp).