The InsFocus YouTube channel is live at http://www.youtube.com/insfocus.

The first video is a demonstration of a profitability report:

Hanan Taiber
CTO

The agent portal is a tool that allows agents to access pre-defined insurance BI reports. The tool is a browser-based, zero-footprint tool, with no learning tool whatsoever. Agents just log in with their agent ID and password, choose a report from the given list and see the results. The portal is available from any Internet-connected device, including iPhones, iPads and Blackberries.

Insurance companies can use this tool to provide agents with information they need to serve existing clients and sell to prospects. Reports may include:

• Activity monitors
• Sales and growth analysis
• Renewal lists
• Cross selling lists

The full press release is available at http://www.insfocus.com/press/insurance-agent-portal.html.

For more information on the new agent portal, contact us at info@insfocus.com or visit InsFocus Systems website.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

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

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

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

Up to now, we had two levels of security – role-based security and data-level security. With the following release, we’re adding another important level of security – restrictions. With user restrictions, we are able to show each user a totally different set of measurements and dimensions.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com

Definitions of the aggregation tables have just got easier with the addition of a new “wizard” page in the System Center named Aggregation Tables Editor. This page allow choosing the definitions of aggregation tables, with their respective time periods, items, dimensions and risk codes.

Using this form, an administrator can:

• Define a new aggregation table or change an existing one.
• Define the time periods for an aggregation table.
• Choose items that are part of the aggregation table.
• Define dimension groups and choose which groups are part of the chosen table.
• Define risk code groups and choose which groups are part of the chosen table.

There are a number of ways to define week numbering schemes in a year. Simplistic methods can set week #1 to be the week in which January 1st occurs. However, this can be misleading as a week can potentially be of 1 or 2 days only. The most useful way to describe a week is using the ISO week standard. There are several ways to define an ISO week, but maybe the most intuitive version is “the first week in a year with at least 4 days in it”.

This means, that according to ISO week, if January 1st is Tuesday, then this week, including Monday (which was still in previous year), are all considered week #1 of this year. Week numbers range from 1 to 52 or 53. This standard is very common in enterprises world-wide.

Of course, there’s still something missing, and that’s the definition of the week – whether it’s Monday – Sunday (typical Western week) or Sunday – Saturday.  This setting affects both the order of days within the week and the definition of the week numbers.

Weeks and day-of-week can prove very important to analysis of trends and for finding hidden information in data. The inclusion of weeks and day-of-week in InsFocus BI greatly enhances its ability to provide insightful data to insurance executives.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com

We have now added a new domain to our model – Premium Collections. This is a sub-model that enables the tracking of premium collections for the different policy transactions issued. It allows keeping track of a number of payments per transaction, of different due and collection dates and so on.

The model covers all aspects of implementing premium collections in a real company. It begins with a sample input structure, continues on to staging and data warehousing structures, ETL scripts, items defined and report template.

Some of the available report templates include:

• Agent premium collection ratio
• Premium collection trends
• Cash flow projection

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

A batch operation is basically an Export (any export – PDF, picture, Excel) or a print operation, in which instead of just exporting or printing the report, we do it for a set of chosen organizational members.

This feature also allows, for example, using scripting tools, to prepare agent profitability reports and send to portals, vaults or e-mail boxes.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com