Information Builders helps organizations transform data into business value. Our business intelligence, integration, and data integrity solutions enable smarter decision- making, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth. Organization Basler Versicherungen, a subsidiary of the Baloise Group, is the fourth largest provider of personal and commercial insurance in Switzerland. The Challenge Eliminate time-consuming manual data collection processes and improve information accessibility for employees, agents, and other sales partners. The Strategy Deploy strategic reporting and analysis applications to support key business functions, such as sales, policy management, customer service, time and attendance, and corporate management. The Results Key information can now be obtained in just minutes; new reporting applications can be created and rolled out to end users more quickly; and substantial improvements have been realized in key operational areas. Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, Developer Studio, Maintain, InfoAssist, iWay adapters for DB2, Oracle, and SAP BW. Snapshot Customer Profile Basler Versicherungen Basler Versicherungen Expands Its Use of WebFOCUS Improved Information Flow Enhances Key Operations for Leading Swiss Insurer Basler Versicherungen employs more than 3,500 professionals and is the Swiss subsidiary of the Baloise Group, a financial services firm that specializes in insurance, pension, and banking services. Basler Versicherungen, Baloise’s largest unit with a business volume totaling CHF 4,108.2 million, passed the four billion mark for the first time. The Swiss unit is currently one of the leading commercial and personal insurance providers in Switzerland and serves a client base that includes private individuals, small and mid-sized companies, and select industrial firms. It sells its life, auto, and other insurance products through its own sales force, as well as through a small network of third-party sales partners. In the past, the company faced several operational challenges. Among them was limited visibility into the performance of the more than 650 brokers who sell its insurance products and drive more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue. WebFOCUS iWay Software
Transcript
Information Builders helps organizations
transform data into business value. Our
business intelligence, integration, and data
integrity solutions enable smarter decision-
making, strengthen customer relationships,
and drive growth.
OrganizationBasler Versicherungen, a subsidiary of the Baloise Group, is the fourth largest provider of personal and commercial insurance in Switzerland.
The ChallengeEliminate time-consuming manual data collection processes and improve information accessibility for employees, agents, and other sales partners.
The StrategyDeploy strategic reporting and analysis applications to support key business functions, such as sales, policy management, customer service, time and attendance, and corporate management.
The ResultsKey information can now be obtained in just minutes; new reporting applications can be created and rolled out to end users more quickly; and substantial improvements have been realized in key operational areas.
Information Builders SolutionWebFOCUS, Developer Studio, Maintain, InfoAssist, iWay adapters for DB2, Oracle, and SAP BW.
Snapshot
Customer Profile
Basler Versicherungen
Basler Versicherungen Expands Its Use of WebFOCUS Improved Information Flow Enhances Key Operations for Leading Swiss Insurer
Basler Versicherungen employs more than 3,500 professionals and is the Swiss subsidiary of the Baloise Group, a financial services firm that specializes in insurance, pension, and banking services. Basler Versicherungen, Baloise’s largest unit with a business volume totaling CHF 4,108.2 million, passed the four billion mark for the first time. The Swiss unit is currently one of the leading commercial and personal insurance providers in Switzerland and serves a client base that includes private individuals, small and mid-sized companies, and select industrial firms. It sells its life, auto, and other insurance products through its own sales force, as well as through a small network of third-party sales partners.
In the past, the company faced several operational challenges. Among them was limited visibility into the performance of the more than 650 brokers who sell its insurance products and drive more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue.
WebFOCUS iWay Software
Basler’s staff also lacked a complete view of customer activity, which hindered service delivery and prevented them from identifying cross-selling opportunities. The company needed to improve access to vital and timely information contained in its corporate systems.
Basler has a long and successful history using Information Builders’ products. The company leverages 80 distinct applications, all built on the WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform, helping Basler to achieve full transparency into the organization and enabling it to efficiently run all facets of its business.
For example, a comprehensive broker cockpit facilitates comprehensive performance visibility and management across the entire landscape of third-party sales partners, while renewal reports help Basler’s own sales forces to better initiate and track policy renewals. Account managers can also provide better service and identify cross-selling opportunities more rapidly by obtaining a 360-degree view of each customer. Additionally, more than 3,500 employees can more effectively log and manage their time.
The company’s expansive use of WebFOCUS has not only increased the productivity of both IT and business professionals, but also helped the company to improve core business activities, such as the development of new products and the formulation of successful sales strategies.
Improving Agent Performance Leveraging WebFOCUS, the company created a variety of applications and made them available to business users on the company’s intranet site. One of them was the broker cockpit, which empowers account managers to more proactively monitor and enhance broker performance.
Because of the limited visibility into their activities, managers struggled to precisely assess the performance of the independent sales agents they oversee. With WebFOCUS, a tabbed dashboard now provides deep insight into all broker operations. Managers can accurately evaluate broker performance by four key criteria – profit, potential, quality, and margins – and compare the performance of each agent against that of their peers.
Account managers can compile compound reports about the brokers’ sales activities to present at management meetings. They can also use the dashboard to upload and organize documents, such as new policies, competitive information, and government and regulatory guidelines, for easy retrieval.
Achieving a Total View of the CustomerAnother application – one of the most critical – supports customer relationship management. Previously, a single, consolidated view of each client across all product lines was nearly impossible to achieve. Thanks to WebFOCUS, agents, brokers, account managers, and other employees can now obtain comprehensive visibility into each client and their history. Ten different Active Technology reports provide customer data from different perspectives, allowing users to analyze what policies clients hold, what transactions they may have conducted with the company’s Retail Banking division, and other crucial factors from any mobile device.
“Our ability to service our customers has greatly improved [with WebFOCUS] now that we can quickly retrieve information whenever we need it.”
Markus JaegleIT SpecialistsBasler Versicherungen
“Our ability to service our customers has greatly improved now that we can quickly retrieve this information whenever we need it,” said Markus Jaegle, one of Basler’s IT specialists. “Even more advantageous is our ability to use that information to identify opportunities to boost revenues by cross-selling additional products and services to our clients.”
Expanding the BI Landscape to Drive Company-Wide Efficiency The success of the first two BI initiatives prompted Basler to roll out other applications. One is designed to aid agents in the renewal process. Through an intuitive web interface, they can easily initiate, track, and manage the policy renewal process from end to end.
Before these new applications were introduced, employees were struggling to get the information they needed to perform their jobs more efficiently. They were forced to manually gather data from seven or more back-end systems, and then consolidate that information into Excel spreadsheets, where they could conduct further manipulation and analysis. “It was a very cumbersome process that wasted a tremendous amount of time,” Jaegle claimed. “Now with WebFOCUS, they can get the data they need in just minutes, with just a few clicks.”
Employees also rely on a new system to enter and track their time and attendance. To date, it is the largest solution created by Basler with WebFOCUS, used by all staff members. It allows them to see when employees arrive to work, when they leave, and when they take breaks. The system also enables them to monitor their use of sick and vacation days.
In the new environment, information from those operational systems is moved into corporate-wide Oracle and SAP BW data warehouses, as well as individual data marts, designed to support specific departments and business units, such as finance, customer service, and claims. All data warehouses and marts, as well as WebFOCUS, are running on the same UNIX platform as the back-end databases, creating complete cohesion among the entire infrastructure. Additionally, WebFOCUS’ seamless integration with Basler’s own internal security architecture helps to keep confidential corporate data fully protected from unauthorized viewing at all times.
The company’s IT team, more than 150 members strong, is also more productive with the help of WebFOCUS Developer Studio. Its user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface is far more efficient than previous development methods and helps the department to accelerate the roll out of the new reporting application to end users.
Efficiency is further enhanced with the help of WebFOCUS Maintain, which extends BI applications with transactional capabilities. Several of the reporting solutions currently deployed at Basler, including the wide-scale time management system, allow end users to not only retrieve information, but also update, change, or add to it by altering data directly in its original source.
Jaegle considers the WebFOCUS applications to be a work in progress. “We are always looking for ways to make them better. We will be upgrading to new versions of WebFOCUS as they become available, so we can take advantage of new capabilities,” he concluded.
“We will be upgrading to new versions of WebFOCUS as they become available, so we can take advantage of new capabilities.”
Markus JaegleIT SpecialistsBasler Versicherungen
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