iPartners is offering its Insurance Scorecard product to provide property/casualty carriers with next-day access to policy and claims information, which will help managers make decisions affecting income and profitability. iPartners has extensive data warehousing and information security experience and has introduced its Insurance Scorecard to assist managers in midsize P&C companies view and analyze all of the data they need to maximize profitability. The scorecard is a hosted Internet application, according to iPartners president Robert Lasher.
Colorado Farm Bureau Insurance is one of 10 carriers that have implemented the scorecard, and the insurer has been in full production with it for about two months, reports vice president of technology Bob Goldberg. "I've been looking for a data warehouse tool that made sense for us," he says. "For a company our size [$64 million in direct written premiums], this was it."
The scorecard automatically loads data from policy and claims systems, stores the data securely, and presents it graphically, Lasher indicates, incorporating more than 40 key performance indicators of immediate past performance and trends over time, with more than 100 ways of displaying that information.
"Without the scorecard, someone has to gather up the data by running a number of queries against different databases and then use the results of those queries to build spreadsheets," Lasher says. "The process usually takes weeks–time that could be spent more profitably on analyzing the business, spotting trends, and taking corrective actions. But when spreadsheets are the primary management tool, all the decision-maker has are individual pictures of parts of the business at a moment in time."
From a technology implementation stand-point, Goldberg explains, the iPartners ASP model works best for companies the size of Colorado Farm Bureau. "It means I don't need to hire an analyst just to understand the tool," he says. "Any data warehouse requires a lot of time and energy, so I don't have to have the individuals to maintain it and the hardware to run it. Also, data requirements change all the time, so I don't have to worry about replacement cycles for hardware to support the tool."
Goldberg describes as "phenomenal" the variety of ways his company has been able to look at its data using this tool. He claims with one report, the carrier can slice and dice its data in 10 different ways.
"The knock on my existing policy processing system is while the data is stored in a way that makes it very efficient from a transactional basis, it doesn't make it very conducive to an account basis," says Goldberg. "By no means would I call our system a legacy system; however, the reports that come out of the system always have been one dimensional. But with the scorecard, the reports show multiple dimensions–one person can be looking at a report by a district, one can look at it by agent, and another person can be looking at the same report by line of business. What gives [the scorecard] its power for us is its multidimensionality."
In addition, Lasher explains, the scorecard provides a comprehensive picture of the entire business, both in summary and in detail. It facilitates analysis, so managers can identify trends, spot problems before they become serious, and spend their time on corrective actions rather than on the tedious tasks that comprise information management.
Previously, the generation of new reports out of the carrier's policy processing system took a lot of time, Goldberg claims. "We've been able to create new reports out of the iPartners system very quickly," he affirms. Goldberg also has been impressed with iPartners grasp of insurance data, which he says has been helpful, as well.
Because the scorecard is an Internet application, clients can become operational much sooner than they could if they chose to develop comparable capabilities in-house. The scorecard also eliminates the cost of in-house hosting and system maintenance.
"The scorecard was developed by people with years of property/casualty management experience," says Lasher. "The metrics, analysis, and measurement framework specific to property/casualty insurance is in place today. Effective financial and operational management is now more important in the property/casualty industry than ever before. Firms absolutely must have the quantity and quality of information the iPartners Insurance Scorecard provides."
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