Attract a more profitable customer base and control your business risks with better strategies than ever — using real-time analysis of the data you have today in the systems that already work for you. Proven, affordable, custom Business Intelligence solutions from 4Sight enable you to:
Assess and monitor risks in your book of business. In the wake of events such as recent natural disasters, insurance companies are looking for ways to diversity and manage geographic risks. 4Sight lets you bring together internal data from your operations, valuations of the assets you insure, and even external data about such issues as weather and geological events. We deliver the view of your business you need to build a property diversified book of business.
Acquire and retain the right customers for your business. Your insurance company is unique, and so are your customers. The 4Sight Business Intelligence framework delivers real-time understanding of relevant customer behaviors, characteristics, and insights into the long-term profitability of your retained business. These combined insights help you make more profitable marketing decisions.
Analyze and understand the drivers that affect your profitability. Drill down into claims information to understand the consequences of daily decisions you make – adjusting your underwriting choices while you can still influence their long-term outcomes.
Manage your book of business for the long term. Selling, cross-selling, and marketing strategies you adopt today will help determine profitability years from now. Prune and shape your book of business for more profitable, sustainable growth.
Improve operational transparency. 4Sight routinely discovers multiple (and often conflicting) definitions that different functional areas use to report operating results. Our expertise in the insurance industry helps us find and fuse these different views of the truth for our clients. Not merely manipulating your data, we understand your business and give you tools to manage with confidence.
Forge a unified strategy your entire company can use. With data trapped in departmental silos and each department analyzing if differently, your views of company performance and risks may become clouded. With a cohesive view of the truth, you can make and evaluate business decisions with confidence.
Improve governance and regulator compliance. An accurate view of company performance is surprisingly difficult to squeeze out of a complex organization. 4Sight delivers easy and intuitive access to the information you need to handle the ever-present burdens of complex corporate governance and regulator compliance.
Linking business intelligence (BI) and business process management (BPM) create stronger operational business intelligence (OBI). As organizations move from developing cubes and management reports towards scorecards, dashboards and real-time BI, the way BI is used is transformed into a proactive decision-making tool. This, coupled with BPM, pushes the concept of embedded BI to the next level.
The Tie In to BI
Many of the benefits in Figure 1 directly relate to BI. By looking deeper into a few of the items organizations can see the natural link that exists between the two.
Reduce process cycle time. Implementing BI helps organizations deliver reports and analysis to decision-makers quicker, enabling them to make informed decisions faster. For instance, reports that may have taken weeks to generate and distribute can be distributed within hours. Additionally, through the use of a data warehouse, information required for specific business processes is housed in a centralized location making it easier to focus in on data required for decision-making without having to search through many thousands or millions of rows that may reside within multiple datasets across the organization. This means that information can be easily accessed, saving time and helping to increase process efficiency.
Handle exceptions faster and better. OBI can be used to identify quality control issues as they occur, giving organizations the ability to detect and correct potential issues proactively instead of after the fact. Just as BPM monitors exceptions to identify issues as they occur, BI can report on these discrepancies within business processes to enable early detection of issues. As an extension, the use of BI to analyze efficiencies in business processes allows organizations to tie financial performance to increased process efficiencies.
Consistent execution. BPM talks about consistent execution of tasks. Within BI, consistency can be related to processes but also expanded to actual data. Through BI, reported and analyzed data becomes consistent throughout the organization. Although Excel may be the most widely used BI tool, when each employee uses their own method to calculate and forecast financial performance, results are anything but consistent. BI allows decision makers across the organization the ability to analyze the same data.
Faster regulatory compliance. One benefit of BI that is constantly being discussed is the ability to meet the requirements of SOX, HIPAA and other regulatory bodies. BPM allows organizations to put processes in place that enable organizations to focus on what tasks need to be completed to meet regulatory compliance, thereby placing regulatory-based activities within everyday tasks. When merged with BI, accurate and faster reporting of data can be ensured to meet compliance on an ongoing basis.
The ultimate goal of business process management is performance management: managing the performance of the organization and its business network by using all assets in ways that achieve a common set of goals and objectives. Performance management enables all individuals to work across strategic, tactical and operational levels to align actions so that the organization produces rapid, effective responses to business challenges.
To connect processes with performance goals, companies need business intelligence capabilities, including metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), executive dashboards and advanced reporting capabilities. They must go beyond just providing reports of basic operational metrics to facilitating access to aggregate data definitions and real-time information. Without BI, it is impossible to correlate process outcomes to corporate performance goals or to apply operational metrics to continuous process improvement.
BI is also a critical tool for analyzing process data. Without it, it’s virtually impossible to measure, evaluate and control business processes. Through process performance reports, BI gives business process managers the means to measure process execution as well as to gain insight into future workflow design improvements. BI tools map out process metrics such as throughput and flow rates in process modeling and then can be used to measure actual process execution. This data can be aggregated from the process implementation and displayed in real time in performance dashboards and reports.
Like corporate performance management systems, BI in a BPM environment supports high-level strategic metrics as well as drill-down analytics and sends alerts when process performance results begin to deviate from targets. In addition, by providing a platform for rule-triggered actions, BI can turn alerts into automated procedures for escalation and remediation in real time, allowing the organization to respond without delay to changes in the business environment. Ultimately, statistics distilled from actual operations can be fed back into the process model to begin the next cycle of performance improvement.
In many cases, business data is far more important than process data for analyzing and optimizing business processes.
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