The insurance business never has suffered from a shortage of data, but developing it into intelligent information has been like harnessing the wind. As business intelligence has matured and improved, though, insurers have been able to focus on specific needs (with an eye out for the enterprise, as well).
BI has become more tactical in its deployment among carriers today, observes Novarica insurance director Matt Josefowicz. “We don’t think that’s a bad thing if you maintain an enterprise perspective,” he says. “Over the past 10 years, traditional data projects come from a supply-side point of view. What we are seeing now is the evolution of demand-driven BI.”
Companies need to start with a business case and then determine how to make it actionable, explains Josefowicz. Carriers then can go back and create the infrastructure to support achieving that business goal. “If you build the infrastructure intelligently, it can be leveraged to support other goals,” he says. “The problem is you can build a massive database with an analytic layer on top, but if no one knows what to do with it, you are not going to get any business value out of it.”
BI has helped Olympus Insurance to identify quickly underwriting trends. “You set it up so you can use those key performance indicators (KPI) and dashboards so they give you the information that is beneficial and meaningful,” says Brad Burton, vice president of underwriting. “It allows us to be more nimble. We are able to react quickly. We eventually might have gotten around to some of the decisions we made, but we were able to make them quicker because we had the information in a format we could use more quickly.”
Olympus found multiple uses for its BI application from iPartners, including underwriting, claims management, and marketing. The carrier distributes its products through independent agencies with several hundred agents to track. The dashboards deliver production and loss experience in a quick and efficient way, indicates Burton.
“We are looking at a way to give the agents their own individual dashboard,” he says. “We have a lot of tweaking still to do because there always is something else people want to see.”
Celina Insurance Group employs about 150 staffers, and Duane Kimball, vice president of data management, estimates 20 percent of those employees use the carrier’s BI solution. Of that group, he feels between half and two thirds are regular users. “With the old solution, there may have been a handful of users sometime during the course of a year,” says Kimball.
Celina mapped out what the carrier wanted users to see and how they wanted to see it. “We had a great deal of interaction [with business users] to make sure it was their product and not [IT’s product],” says Kimball. “It wasn’t a matter of what I wanted to see out there; it was what the business needed to do its job.”
Celina uses the BI tool for personnel management that involves workflows and managing assignments. It also uses the tool to drill down into the data to find claims with reserves over a specific dollar amount, putting that information at users’ fingertips, according to Ted Wissman, vice president of claims for the carrier. When the remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through the Midwest in September, Celina was able to update those claims and validate them using the new solution. “We could sort by data loss, the amount paid, or whether a CAT code was assigned to it with checks and balances to make sure the claims were properly identified,” he says. “Those were tedious, paper-intensive processes, but with iPartners, once the data file goes out, we go through a simple process of validating the numbers. It takes us a lot less time, and the information is 100 percent accurate.”
Celina also manages its assignments for adjusters on a daily basis to make sure the claims are going where they are supposed to, and the carrier watches pending losses and looks at different coverages, according to Wissman. The company does not yet use its BI tool to assess severity of claims, but with small carriers severity numbers can have great impact in the short term, so that is another change that will come from the solution.
Robert Pickering claims AAA Allied Group is no different than other companies in dealing with workers reluctant to embrace new technology. “Everybody was used to the individualized, customized version of the report that showed only the information [that person was] interested in,” says Pickering, vice president of information services for the company.
As Pickering and his team educated the business lines on the amount of effort required on the back end to maintain all those reports, he received business-line support to explain the information was there but needed to be manipulated in a new way. “These are new tool sets, and with new tool sets come education,” he says.
AAA Allied Group also was rolling out SharePoint as a portal technology at the same time, adds Pickering. “So, a lot of the change we are able to push on folks is a result of the way we disseminate information as a whole,” he says. “This is just another piece of that change.”
Celina had a data warehouse solution in place before selecting its BI solution, but it required a lot of maintenance and expertise Kimball didn’t think the carrier had on staff. “My main thinking was the warehouse should be a tool to enable the managers of our company to do their jobs easily and quickly,” he says.
Wissman felt the business users were ready for a change. “[The old system] was burdensome for the end user to drill down into the data,” he says. “The iPartners solution works well for us.”
Business intelligence has given Olympus a wider range of information in a much more efficient fashion, notes Burton. Olympus outsources its policy processing, so the carrier doesn’t have IT in-house or anyone creating reports or data management analysis. “We normally would have to get that through our vendor, but it has other clients, so getting the information is not always as efficient as it needs to be or done in a timely manner,” says Burton.
There were three steps taken by Olympus: identify what was needed, get it out in a format where its vendor could grab it, and then start assembling the dashboards and the KPI the carrier needed to see.
Its latest vendor partnership, though, has given Olympus what it needs: a wide range of information in a very timely manner. “We’ve created key performance indicators and a lot of different dashboards that are pertinent to each facet of the business—underwriting, claims, marketing—that we can use on a daily basis and some of it on a monthly basis, depending on the need,” says Burton. “We’re able to get a great deal of knowledge quickly and at a click. Before we had to create the reports and queries; they were more cumbersome on our part to get done.
AAA Allied Group attacked its information issues from two angles—IT and the business side, according to Pickering. “From a technology standpoint, we were looking to find a way of maintaining our reporting environment for the BI information we present to our management,” he says.
AAA’s IT team was spending a considerable amount of time supporting, changing, and altering existing reports along with creating new ones. “I was desperate to find a solution that would put report creation in the hands of the people who had the most information about the business,” he says.
As Unitrin Direct rolled out the BI tool from SAS, IT and the business partnered together to create a repository of data that end users could access for reporting on and monitoring business performance, according to Shaun McGovern, director of product management for the carrier.
IT provides cleansed data at a granular level, explains McGovern. Analysts from the business side can access this information on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis to create their own summarized versions for generating reports that are sent out to end users, management, and senior management.
“We’ve been working on productionizing the reporting process so many of the month-end and quarter-end reports can be generated and distributed quickly for people’s viewing pleasure,” he says.
Unitrin Direct collects a large amount of data on a monthly basis and needs to turn it into useful information for analytical and business purposes. The metrics are put on the summarized versions of the data, continues McGovern.
Some business users want to see the summarized data in an Excel table, and others want to see it in a report in a PDF file format. Unitrin’s BI tool allows the carrier to disseminate the information either way, relates McGovern.
“We have analysts in each department to help do more ad hoc reporting once we see the monthly data,” he says. “They see whether there are any anomalies in the data or any issues we see with new business we are writing. It forces us to look deeper at the data, and we have the ability to go back to the more granular data sets and start doing more ad hoc analysis.”
Thomas Vaughan, vice president of marketing for AAA Allied Group, points out two issues needed to be resolved from a business standpoint. “If you look at it in terms of how people spend their time, we found middle management spent an inordinate amount of time collecting, organizing, interpreting, and subsequently distributing information,” he says.
As the business users became more reliant on information, they had to spend a higher percentage of their time going through those four steps. “They reach a certain point where their productivity is declining,” says Vaughan. “We needed a way to automate that process to find what information they are utilizing on a regular basis, how they typically organize it to be useful, how we can change the way it is presented so it is easier to interpret, and then automate the distribution of it. As we worked with [Pickering] and his team, we were looking at solutions that could stabilize the report generation process and go deeper into the process to what’s done with the information.”
The second issue AAA Allied Group faced was the determination to develop an additional tool set to look at data across the enterprise as opposed to the vertical business-line data sets users had been accustomed to, continues Vaughan.
The challenge AAA and other insurers face was the data experts, who knew where the data was and how it was being stored, from an architectural standpoint, were in information systems, according to Pickering. But the BI knowledge was with the end user. What Tableau Software allowed AAA to do was teach the business users a different way of accessing the data and give them the tools to manipulate the data to get the answers they were looking for, adds Pickering.
“From a much broader view, we are taking all the custom reports and converting those into Tableau reports on the back end, and we then publish a high-level report with all the data in it and give the individuals who use those reports the ability to consume through our SharePoint portal or through a different type of Tableau Web license and manipulate the data themselves,” he says.
Kimball sees more enhancements coming at Celina, particularly with Wissman’s wish list for the claims department. “We wanted to go into it slowly to make sure it was doing what it was supposed to do,” he says. “I didn’t want it to turn into a situation where only a handful of people were using it. My focus here was trying to come up with something that allows you to drill down instead of drilling up, which is a tendency we have around here—and that it be used.”
Pickering believes the biggest success story for his company’s implementation has been the ability to give business users a wider view of the environment.
“Before, they only got information at a very micro level, and as we’ve been rolling out broader-range reports that allow them to drill down to the information, they see the information in a more macro viewpoint, and it gives them more appreciation for the rest of the business,” he says. “You now see people collaborating more often because they have information at their fingertips they didn’t have available before. It gives them more appreciation of a support center or a supporting business line.”
The tool from SAS still is relatively new for Unitrin Direct, and the carrier is discovering capabilities it previously didn’t know existed. “That’s been very helpful from a reporting capability,” McGovern says. “We want to update reports and get them out as soon as they are available.”
The BI tool has made some aspects of the job easier, but McGovern notes a lot of work remains involving the creation of accurate reports. “You have to spend a fair amount of time building reports, checking the data, and verifying everything before you send it out,” he says. “The great thing is we have the tool to do it. It’s been a win for our department to drill down in the data and take a look at how the business actually is performing.”