Customers send requests for auto insurance into the Asheville sales office, where sales clerks prepare policy request forms. They file a copy of the form and forward the original to the input preparation section, where data entry clerks use networked PCs to key and key-verify the data contained on the documents to a disk ("policy requests").
Each evening, computer operations retrieves the policy request data from the network, edits the data on the computer for accuracy (e.g., all required fields completed), sorts the data in policy number sequence, and prints a summary report listing the edited policy requests. The summary report is sent to the sales office, where the sales clerks compare the report to the copy of the policy request form that they previously filed. If everything checks out, they notify computer operations to go ahead with processing. When notified, computer operations processes the correct policy request data against the policyholder master data to create a new policy record. Each evening, a disk, which was created during the processing run, is used to print premium notices that are sent to the customer.