Information Builders enables agile

information solutions with the

WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI)

platform and integration technologies

from iWay Software.

OrganizationPhysicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) offers reliable Medicare supple-ment, dental, supplemental health, and long-term care insurance.

The ChallengePhysicians Mutual relies on multiple systems to administer its policies, neces-sitating tedious processes to extract data, store it in databases, and create custom reports for policy-owner and claims ad-ministration, financial auditing, underwrit-ing, and other business functions.

The StrategyCreate subject-specific data marts and re-porting objects to guide business users to the correct information. Use self-service, user-friendly reporting tools to help users handle their own reporting and informa-tion-distribution needs.

The ResultsPMIC now has a growing base of self-sufficient business users in accounting, claims, policy management, owner ser-vices, billing, and other areas, minimizing dependence on IT and making the entire organization more productive.

Information Builders SolutionWebFOCUS InfoAssist, ReportCaster, and Business Intelligence Dashboard.

Snapshot

Customer Profile

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company

Physicians Mutual Ensures End-User Productivity With WebFOCUS InfoAssistFinance Officers, Auditors, and Other Managers Gain BI Proficiency at Leading Insurance Company

Founded in 1902, Physicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) provides health, life, and retirement insurance products to individuals and families all across the country. As a leader in these information-intensive markets, Physicians Mutual set out to solve a familiar challenge: enabling business users to address their own business intelligence (BI), reporting, and information-distribution needs without having to depend heavily on IT for custom data-access and analysis activities.

To fulfill this objective, Physicians Mutual deployed WebFOCUS InfoAssist, a flexible guided ad hoc reporting solution from Information Builders that enables users to gather, analyze, and publish information on their own – with little or no training. While the IT department handles data quality and centrally manages critical data assets, employees throughout the company use InfoAssist to easily access, review,

and analyze information – from a familiar Microsoft Office-like environment that shields them from the underlying complexities of summarizing mainframe data constructs and creating ad hoc reports.

“WebFOCUS InfoAssist enables our staff to create complex reports very quickly,” confirms Rick Olson, senior manager of data administration and business intelligence in the Enterprise Technology Group (ETG) at Physicians Mutual. “We expect the number of InfoAssist users to grow as more and more people experience its capabilities.”

Grass Roots ReportingPhysicians Mutual initially introduced WebFOCUS InfoAssist to several people in the accounting department. With no formal training, these employees were soon using InfoAssist to create reports from the company’s Premium Details data mart. About 20 financial personnel now use InfoAssist on a daily basis to examine general ledger (GL) balances and to investigate and explore statutory details.

The accounting team is able to easily generate everything from simple queries to complex reports, publishing and sharing reports with other people in Excel or PDF formats. This user-friendly environment enables accounting staff to compare premium details with GL summaries by drilling down into the detail data.

“Being able to point WebFOCUS InfoAssist to our predefined reporting objects has been a big win for us,” says Grant Christensen, vice president of accounting and taxation at Physicians Mutual. “We can very easily look at accounting information in the general ledger in a variety of ways, such as the amount of premium by journal code, account code, line of business, journal date, type of policy, state, even down to ZIP code. We now have the ability to create our own reports in a secure and productive end-user reporting environment.”

Physicians Mutual’s accounting department didn’t need any training to become proficient with InfoAssist. “They just clicked on options and learned it on their own, with a few questions every now and then,” says Olson. “Individuals in accounting used to spend a couple of days creating reports that they can now generate in a few minutes.”

Local Flexibility, Centralized ControlPhysicians Mutual’s Enterprise Technology Group (ETG) creates InfoAssist reporting objects to speed up end-user reporting processes and ensure that employees always access sanctioned information. For example, the Premium Detail reporting object joins information from several tables in the data mart, simplifying ad hoc reporting and promoting accuracy, since data is always joined and available in a consistent way. It only took the ETG four hours to build a reporting object that now serves 20 accounting users on a daily basis.

“Individuals in accounting used to spend a couple of days creating reports that they can now generate in a few minutes [with InfoAssist].”

“The reporting object for the Premuim Detail domain has six dimensions and one fact table,” Olson says. “It joins all of this information so users don’t have to know anything about the data structures. They obtain consistent results since the information is pre-joined in advance. Internal auditors like this feature because it helps assure consistent reports.”

Sheri Smith is one of those happy auditors. As assistant vice president of internal audit, she manages a team that conducts internal audits and assists external auditors with financial reporting reviews. She says their work requires lots of ad hoc reporting, such as pulling transactions by policy, testing samples for accuracy, and analytically reviewing financial data and balances.

Because Physicians Mutual relies on multiple administration systems to administer its policies, Smith’s team used to go through a tedious process to extract data from mainframe databases, accumulate it in a temporary database, and then create custom reports to balance it. She has worked at the company for 15 years and is very well acquainted with the data. Now a lot of her knowledge resides in the InfoAssist reporting object, which enables her to delegate more reporting duties to her staff.

“InfoAssist is fairly intuitive compared to other reporting tools we have used in the past,” she says. “My team can now spend more time on analysis instead of report writing. Going forward, Physicians Mutual will leverage this tool for many other departments and business functions.”

An Enterprise EffortEmployees in the Claim Services and Policyowner Services areas are also using InfoAssist to create productivity reports. Meanwhile, the Billing department is using it to analyze late notices and billing reminders. Actuaries are also gradually supplementing their work in Microsoft Access and Excel with InfoAssist reports.

InfoAssist does not require any software on individual desktop computers. The browser-based environment guides authorized users through the process of issuing queries, creating customizable reports, displaying data in drillable charts and graphs, and developing dashboards from sanctioned enterprise information sources. Users can save reports to a library, publish them on the corporate intranet, or share them with other users in HTML, Adobe Flash/Flex, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, and other formats.

“InfoAssist is fairly intuitive compared to other reporting tools we have used in the past. My team can now spend more time on analysis instead of report writing.”

WebFOCUS InfoAssistWebFOCUS InfoAssist eliminates time-consuming deployment and administration chores that are common with other ad hoc reporting solutions. There is no software to install and no desktop clients to maintain – just a rich Internet application that exposes powerful ad hoc applications to authorized business users across the enterprise via the web.

To supplement these end-user reporting activities, Olson’s team is developing WebFOCUS dashboards with data visualization icons such as sparklines and bullet graphs. These dashboards are particularly useful to managers and executives who want to view numbers embedded in drillable graphs.

WebFOCUS gives Physicians Mutual the flexibility it needs to create reports and dashboards that straddle multiple databases and computing platforms. WebFOCUS can directly access mainframe Virtual Storage Access Methods (VSAM) data from the mainframe system, DB2 data from an IBM AIX midrange system, and SQL Server data from Windows PCs. For example, the team used WebFOCUS to create compensation reports for its agent management organization and production reports for the Underwriting department. Underwriting reports track how many applications were submitted, approved, rejected, and so forth, helping a dozen employees to monitor the business by product line.

“These reports were formerly created using FOCUS on the mainframe. The report data was then manually re-entered into Excel spreadsheets for distribution,” says Olson. “The reports were converted to WebFOCUS and now ReportCaster automatically runs the reports, formats the output directly into Excel, and places the reports in our Report Library for easy access.

“Eliminating the manual reporting jobs and data-entry chores saves the equivalent of about 20 percent of one person’s time. It also improves accuracy by eliminating discrepancies due to data-entry errors.”

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