The InsFocus Advantage for Insurance Companies
Hi,
We have just released a new marketing document named The InsFocus Advantage for Insurance Companies. This document summarizes what makes InsFocus a unique business intelligence solution for insurance companies.
The document’s contents are:
- Company background and history
- Insurance-specific functionality
- Insurance content
- Reporting and analysis infrastructure
- User interface features
- Implementation methodology
I hope you find the document interesting and helpful. For more information, contact us or write us an e-mail to info@insfocus.com.
Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com
New BI usage statistics tool for InsFocus
We are happy to announce today a great addition to our host of web-based administration tools, bundled together under InsFocus System Center. The new tool, named “Usage Statistics”, allows analyzing the logs of InsFocus BI reporting and analysis solution, creating a BI environment over InsFocus BI application.
The new tool provides the following views:
- Viewing a summary “users usage” report or a detailed daily “users usage” report.
- Customizing report dates (last 7 days, last 30 days, custom).
- Viewing a report for all users or for a single user.
- Requesting a report on query run operations, login operations or report opening operations.
- Viewing a “reports usage” report, showing how many times each report was accessed at the defined period.
- Viewing the “reports usage” even for non-accessed reports, to find reports that are not being used.
- Exporting results to CSV.
We believe that this tool will allow administrators to better control system usage at the company, enhance the company’s reports library and track usage patterns of InsFocus.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com
Version 1.92 Announced with Banding Support
Hi,
We are happy to announce the release of a new version of InsFocus BI, version 1.92. The new version will be shipped by the end of the month, and will further enhance the analytics and reporting abilities of our business intelligence solution.
Version 1.92 has two major additions. The first one, Banding, is an exciting new feature allowing a whole different style of reports, such as showing figures by agent’s loss ratios, by policies’ sums insured, by client’s year of birth, and all with fast, simple to define, dynamic bands. The second addition, Query Builder tables editor, is an advanced Javascript editor for the query definitions, and should facilitate the work of implementing InsFocus BI.
Bands (profiling)
We call “banding” the process of taking data and splitting it by dynamically created bands. This can be simple data, such as an insured’s age, or complex data, such as loss-frequency. Banding is heavily used in insurance, where reports such as risk profiling, client segmentation and so are needed on a regular basis.
- Create bands on:
- Dimension attributes (e.g. client year of birth, policy #)
- Risk parameters (e.g. engine size, year of manufacturing, floor number)
- Any item (e.g. loss-frequency, sum insured, number of policies)
- Dynamically define band ranges
- Display multiple bands in a report on X, Y or Z axes
- Drill-down into any band to further explore underlying data.
System Center has Query Builder Table Editing
The transition from our previous tool, the Admin Util, to the new System Center, is complete with the introduction of the Query Builder table editor. The editor allows editing all Query Builder XML definition tables.
- Fully HTML-Javascript editor working in all browsers
- Has special editors for columns linked to other tables and other data types
- Displays meta-data to ease editing of tables
- Allows filtering and paging
Small changes
- Ability to add additional attributes of dimensions (e.g. client phone #) even when no items axis is there or in multi-dimension reports
- Snapshot with repeat functionality at end of month/quarter
- Comparison in operation time base works correctly in partial periods also when “show future data” is checked
- Snapshot time base can be shown with auxiliary time bases (e.g. policy inception)
- Valid dates are displayed in time period headers
- Drill-down from time period headers changes valid date according to header date
For further inquiries on the new version and its new features, visit our web-site or contact us at info@insfocus.com.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com
System Center gains Query Builder table editing
Today we are proud to announce that the transition from our previous tool, the Admin Util, to the new System Center, is complete with the introduction of the Query Builder table editor.
The table editor is a sophisticated tool allowing easy editing of Query Builder definitions. By using advanced methods such as row-by-row editing, zero-footprint Javascript code and asynchronous saving, we provide a fast, convenient and simple mechanism for editing the Query Builder tables. Together with the “wizards” for item, dimension and aggregation tables editing, the system center provides administrators a centralized and easy-to-use customization mechanism.
The new tool will be included in our next release, coming in a few weeks.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com
Why is InsFocus BI better suited for insurance companies’ analysis and reporting needs?
Last week Hanan has published a blog post in CIO.com regarding our experiences with BI (business intelligence) in insurance, and what makes reporting and analysis different for this vertical. You can read the original blog post Here. In this post I will explain why we believe InsFocus BI is better suited to this job.
When we set out to build InsFocus a few years ago, we found there is a fundamental shortcoming in the way reporting and analysis is done in insurance companies. The main problem was that there was a clear separation between the tool and the model. Thus, a company would go into a process of choosing a tool that looked fit for the purpose (usually Cognos or BO). As a second phase, the company will hire professionals or use in-force persons to build the data model and the ETL processes.
The outcome, in many companies’ view, is disappointing. The tool, that had looked very nice on “demo” data (which is usually simple retail data), suddenly looks rigid and not flexible enough. The model, that is developed by BI professionals, misses the sophistication of insurance. Then, the company goes into endless cycles of data model improvements and enhancements.
So why do we believe that InsFocus BI is better? For a few reasons.
- Built-in data model – InsFocus BI ships with a comprehensive insurance data model, covering most insurance aspects available. The model includes earned and unearned premiums, deferred acquisition costs, outstanding claims, IBNR calculations, and a lot more. So basically, we know the end result before even starting. This alone saves tons of executive time, BI developer time and saves the company from making a lot of mistakes.
- A tool that is built for insurance – InsFocus BI is not just a shallow data model, but a sophisticated tool that is built specifically for insurance. So, unique insurance techniques, such as changing calculations according to the presented time base (e.g. underwriting, accounting), showing triangulation views, calculating run-off using claim filters, finding the sums insured at a specific snapshot date, and many many more, are already built into the tool.
- Granular reporting and advanced filtering – a unique characteristic of insurance reporting is the figures distortion that can be caused by a single event – one big claim can distort an agent’s full record if looking only at top-level averages. To support insurance analysis, InsFocus BI provides two important capabilities:
- Drill-down to any level – not just fixed drill-down. With InsFocus BI, you can drill-down to any level, including client, policy, claim and even the individual policy and claim transactions.
- Pre-filters – InsFocus BI allows easy creation of pre-query filter on the measurements themselves, enabling analysis such as “show me profitability ignoring claims above X” or “show me a list of the top biggest claims in the last 1 year”.
- Ad-hoc reporting – generic solutions have traditionally split users into two superficial types. One type is the so-called “simple user”, who presumably is not computer literate and only wants to see ready-made reports. The second type is the “power user”, who wants to do slicing-and-dicing and maybe alter some reports. In InsFocus, we decided we won’t do not agree with this distinction, and we enabled ad-hoc querying for all users.
This is especially useful as insurance information workers need ad-hoc querying, and a lot. New reporting needs arise almost daily – and going to the IT department for every new report is a huge waste of time and resources. Using InsFocus BI, we enabled all information workers to perform their own analysis using a very simple to use interface.
We will continue to improve InsFocus BI, and we are very dedicated to the insurance business.
Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems