Absolute Beginners Guide to Tablet PCs

The insurance adjuster evaluates vehicles for damage and assesses the costs to repair vehicles, if repairable. She often works outside the office with her clients, and wants to take up as little of each client's time as possible.

Toolkit

• Convertible style Tablet PC This style of Tablet PC is ideal for high text demands.

• Noise-canceling headset Using this type of headset makes using the Tablet PC's speech-recognition features much easier.

• Dragon Naturally Speaking This program is perfect for higher-quality speech recognition.

• Microsoft Office 2003 The insurance adjuster uses this to prepare documents and email.

• Adobe Acrobat This program is used for digital document creation.

• Digital camera This can be used to capture pictures of the policyholder's vehicle.

• Bluetooth adapter This is necessary for data communication with other Bluetooth-enabled devices.

• Bluetooth mobile phone This can be used to connect to the Tablet PC for wireless Internet access.

• InfoPath This program can be used for data capture.

Value Proposition

Instead of taking notes while looking at the vehicle, then looking up part and labor costs, the insurance adjuster can now use the small, wireless Tablet PC to take notes, take pictures, and look up information without ever having to return to the office.

Day in the Life

The insurance adjuster arrives at the office, checks email, and responds to a few messages. Two new cases have notified her that that they will be in this morning, and she pulls up the information on their policies to determine their coverage.

When the first client arrives, the insurance adjuster takes her Tablet PC out to the client's vehicle, ready with the client's file open and the claim form partially completed. The claim form uses InfoPath 2003, which allows the insurance adjuster to enter information into a form, and then upload the information into the company database system using XML.

The insurance adjuster greets the client, and then walks around the vehicle, taking pictures with the digital camera inserted into the Tablet PC's PC card slot. The camera is sufficient to capture the details required, while not being separate from the Tablet PC. After several pictures are taken, they are dragged into the InfoPath application, where they are stored with the client's electronic claim file.

The insurance adjuster then asks some questions about the accident and enters the answers into the Tablet PC, using the machine's voice-recognition capabilities. Because the client was able to drive the car to the office, the insurance adjuster can access her network and server-based applications, which enable her to handle all claim-settlement tasks without returning to the office. After she submits the claim to her server, it goes through processing, which aggregates the information from InfoPath and other sources and creates a report in Word. Then, a check is automatically printed for the client. The insurance adjuster enters the office to retrieve the report and the check, and then sends the client on his way.

Later in the day, the insurance adjuster gets a call while at lunch. One of her clients was involved in a collision, and the car is not movable. While she finishes her lunch, the insurance adjuster connects her Tablet PC to the Internet via the Bluetooth connection with her phone. She can download all necessary information on the client's policy, and has populated as much of the InfoPath application as possible without entering anything herself.

She gets the rest of her lunch to go, and travels to the client's vehicle, and completes the report in a similar fashion to the first. However, because she is out of the office, she maintains her data connection through her Bluetooth phone and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) link back to the office, which ensures security. After submitting the InfoPath data to the server, she drives back to the office, where the check is waiting. The client can wait for the money, but the insurance adjuster wants to provide the highest level of service, so she delivers it on her way home that afternoon.

Summary of Benefits