Insurance Performance Management Solutions

Our client is one of the world's largest insurance brokers, offering dozens of products across both personal and corporate markets. As an insurance broker, they offer a series of products that include both their own family of products as well as products from other insurers. Within the Risk Management Services group alone there are thirteen types of products, ranging from actuarial to terrorism to business continuity.

Within our clients risk management service, the management system tracks the revenue generated by all of these products, as well as policy, billing, and insured activity. A major complication to our clients business is the fact that there is no centralized reporting system across the numerous offices. As a result, executives and Finance personnel can not track country-wide revenue from a central data source - reporting is gathered from each office and manually consolidated using spreadsheets.

With these multiple systems and the manual consolidation process, our client spends too much time and money on revenue reporting. The executive cross divisional reporting has to be executed monthly and requires 2-3 people from corporate finance to gather, consolidate and validate the data before doing any analysis. At the operational level and at individual branches there are staff members that spend a 50-60% of their time in manual processes around reporting. For example, the aging of receivables is a manual process that requires the divisional controllers to spend at least 3-4 dedicated days to complete. More important is the resulting effect on managing revenue. The inconsistent, manual process leads to numerous missed opportunities for new sales, cross-sales, and up-sales, especially within the internal family of products. In addition, the lack of consolidated reporting makes it difficult for our client to do deep analysis on rates given by the carriers, so that it can negotiate rates to benefit from economies of scale.

Recognizing that a central reporting system was needed for flexibility, consolidation and scalability of reporting, JCB Partners helped implement a performance management and business intelligence solution, utilizing our award-winning skills in data warehousing and ETL.

JCB began by analyzing the 15 source systems that needed to be consolidated. From there, a data movement approach and strategy was created for moving the data into a staging area, transforming it, and loading the data into a star schema-modeled data hub. One of the challenges in merging all of this data together is the mismatching and standardization of codes across systems. Part of this effort included the construction of a mapping process that permits branch accountants to map key data elements to the master data values used in the warehouse. The final challenge was the extraction of data from the data hub to be loaded into the corporate general ledger, which is housed in JD Edwards. This process required the extraction of summa-
rized daily activity by each branch office, consolidated and formatted exactly for acceptance by JD Edwards. Because this system is the primary financial system for our publically-traded client, there was rigorous testing and validation required to meet Sarbanes-Oxley and audit requirements.

The creation of a central data warehouse provided a place consolidated revenue and branch office information in a single source, and also provided a strong foundation for reporting. IBM Cognos 8 reporting and ad hoc analysis was then applied against the data warehouse, providing Corporate Finance and Senior Management users with the management reporting and ad hoc analysis capabilities needed to manage revenue more effectively. The reports created for Corporate Finance and management included:

• Revenue by Producer, by Niche, by Branch, by Division, by Product and by Carrier
• Top 50 Accounts 
• Lost Account and Renewal Breakdown 
• Market and Underwriting Company Analysis

Our client rolled out the initial solution to between ten and twenty users in Corporate Finance and Senior Management, providing them for the first time with the ability to generate revenue reporting across products and across offices from a single source. Additionally, they expect to roll the solution out to as many as 200 users across Corporate Finance, offices, branch operations, and the executive ranks. As the solution is expanded to more users, our client will reap direct benefits to its top line revenue, perhaps in the amount of $1 million or more. This benefit is expected to be recognized in the internal family of products and by negotiating the rates with the individual market companies.

At JCB, we think strategically, from start to finish, determining the most effective and sustainable way to utilize technology and resources to drive business forward. We start small, helping companies realize results quickly while establishing and embracing a culture of analytics. And we accelerate systematically, continually assessing the larger picture as we apply learnings and progress logically. This is the JCB difference. By working hand-in-hand with our client's employees, JCB was able to deliver a solution that solves the immediate issues around revenue reporting across offices with a new, more efficient reporting system that sets the stage for future performance improvements.