Customer Overview
The Baldwin Group is a leading insurance brokerage, supporting clients across multiple lines of business, including Property & Casualty (P&C) and Employee Benefits.
Within the Employee Benefits practice, teams regularly analyze complex insurance documents in order to create client-facing comparison guides and benefits summaries. These documents can include materials such as Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs), Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBCs), and other carrier documentation, which often span hundreds of pages and contain detailed information about plan coverage and benefits.
Employee Benefits teams must review these documents, extract key details, and compile them into structured guides that help clients understand and compare their options. Across the organization, Baldwin teams generate approximately 160 benefits guides per month, making efficiency and consistency critical to their operations.
The Challenge
Before implementing a Feathery-powered workflow, Baldwin’s process for generating employee benefits guides relied heavily on manual document review and data aggregation.
Internally, Baldwin referred to this effort as their “comparatives” initiative, aimed at improving how their teams generate policy comparisons and client-facing materials.
Producers would receive plan documents from carriers and then manually review them to identify relevant coverage information. Because these documents often contained hundreds of pages, extracting the right information required careful reading and interpretation.
In addition to analyzing plan documents, teams also needed to aggregate information from multiple sources, including policy documents, internal systems, and supporting materials, before assembling comparison guides in PowerPoint templates (PPTX), with supporting documentation generated in Word.
This process required constant switching between:
- carrier documents
- internal templates
- presentation materials
- supporting data sources
As a result, creating guides was both time-consuming and difficult to standardize across teams. Depending on the complexity of the plan and the amount of coordination required, producing a single benefits guide could take anywhere from several hours to multiple days.
In addition to the heavy manual effort required, teams also faced challenges around:
- Standardization – different teams often assembled guides in different ways
- Data normalization – carrier documents often present the same information in different formats, requiring teams to manually reconcile and organize the data before generating guides
- Organization – information had to be gathered from multiple documents and systems
Before and After: Automating the Benefits Guide Workflow
The Solution
Baldwin engaged Feathery to automate the analysis of employee benefits documents and streamline the creation of client-ready guides. Feathery’s platform enables insurance document automation and proposal generation workflows, allowing broker teams to extract key data from policy documents and generate comparison guides much faster.
Working together, the teams designed a customized workflow that automatically analyzes benefits documentation and organizes key information into a structured process.
Feathery integrates with Baldwin’s Agency Management System, allowing teams to pull structured policy data while also extracting information from uploaded insurance documents.
Using Feathery, Baldwin can now:
- Automatically analyze insurance documents and extract relevant benefits data
- Organize extracted information into structured workflows
- Map the data into branded templates used for employee benefits guides
- Generate standardized comparison materials more efficiently
Feathery’s workflow can also combine structured data from APIs with information extracted from uploaded documents, allowing Baldwin to generate comparisons even when some policy information is not available in their AMS.
Feathery initially worked closely with Baldwin to design and implement the workflow. The implementation process took approximately four to six weeks, after which Baldwin teams were able to maintain and update workflows using Feathery’s no-code editor.
Baldwin’s internal design team now manages template updates directly within Feathery, allowing them to adjust branding and formatting as needed. The underlying workflow requires minimal changes for the Employee Benefits use case.
Results
Since implementing Feathery’s solution, Baldwin has dramatically reduced the time required to generate employee benefits guides and supporting materials.
Workflows that previously took up to 16 hours just to build the initial structure of a benefits guide can now be completed in 30–45 minutes, even when accounting for initial setup and document uploads. As teams become familiar with the workflow, turnaround times become even faster.
This represents a reduction of over 95% in service time, allowing teams to analyze complex benefits documents, extract key information, and generate client-ready materials significantly more efficiently.
Baldwin teams have also highlighted the flexibility of the platform and the responsiveness of the Feathery team as key advantages. The ability to automate document-heavy workflows while maintaining control over templates has helped standardize processes and improve speed across teams.
Additional benefits include:
- reduced manual document analysis and data extraction
- more standardized workflows across teams and regions
- significantly faster delivery of insights and materials to clients
Expanding Use Cases
What began as a workflow automation initiative has evolved into broader adoption of Feathery across Baldwin.
Today, Feathery supports Employee Benefits teams across multiple regions, and Baldwin continues to explore additional use cases across the organization.
In addition to the Employee Benefits workflows, Baldwin teams are also exploring automation opportunities in other areas of the business, including integration workflows with their cyber insurance team, as they expand the use of Feathery across additional processes.
See how insurance teams are automating benefits guide workflows.
In this webinar, we walk through real-world examples, including how The Baldwin Group reduced benefits guide creation time from 16 hours to 30–45 minutes using automated document workflows.
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