In the two previous blog posts we introduced two major components of InsFocus BI version 2.0 – the all-new Web client and the greatly enhanced insurance data model.

Nevertheless, there are dozens of other small and large improvements to the version 2.0, which expand the system’s functionality, enhances its scalability and simplifies its use. I will talk about those changes in this post.

Report search

This was high on our customers wish list. InsFocus BI, both on Windows and on the Web, now supports searching for reports. Search is done on all sub-categories. Results of search are displayed in a table with the path to each report, its details and the ability to open the report or go to its folder.

Application definitions & log database

In this version we introduced the InsFocus Definitions Database. This database aggregates all application definitions (e.g. users, reports) and states (users connected) into one database. The database replaces the previous XML files. The advantages of the database are:

1. Automatically keeps track of all tables historical changes.
2. User sessions are kept on disk so they are not lost even if the server restarts.
3. The system can now support more scalability and availability in terms of multiple application servers running.

Full-text search for auto-complete filters

Many filters in the input use auto-complete filters, in cases where dimensions have many values and cannot be displayed in lists. Those dimensions may include clients, policy numbers, claimants, etc. When the user starts typing the text, a list of values is loaded from the database. When dealing with large tables containing hundreds of thousands or millions of rows (for example clients table), performance can be an issue. To overcome this problem, we now utilize SQL Server’s full-text search feature to make those searches within fractions of a second.

Announcements / Information mechanism

Two new mechanisms are now available in InsFocus:

1. Information – constant information visible to users on login, such as internal support phone and e-mail.
2. Announcements – announcements visible to users on login, such as new features, system downtime, etc.

Even more

Other improvements that are part of this version include:

1. New System Center reports screen – for easier administration of report libraries.
2. Support for “exclude” restrictions (e.g. users who are NOT allowed to view claims).
3. Report definitions now support “next” periods (e.g. see report for next 1 month).
4. Definition of a default role and a default restriction level.

To download a summary of all changes in version 2.0, click here.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

Yesterday we introduced InsFocus BI version 2.0, beginning with the brand-new Web client (see our previous blog post).

Another important enhancement in version 2.0 is the new data model, which I’ll introduce in this post.

General

The InsFocus Insurance Data Model is a data warehousing model, built specifically for the world of insurance. This model has been a central part of our system from the early beginning.

In this version, we introduced dozens of improvements to our data model. Some of the improvements are lessons we learned during projects, and some are direct feedback from our clients. This set of changes makes the data model of even greater value to our current and new customers.

What is new in the data model?

We added a lot of new functionality and subject areas to the data model. Some of the changes are design changes, some are ETL changes and some are new items (KPIs) definitions. The data model now contains more than 300 different items, running dozens of different calculation templates.

The additions in the latest version to the data model include:

• Improved item naming – we went over all item texts and improved naming for better clarity and understandability.
• Support for multiple source systems.
• Support for product group risk codes.
• "New/cancelled section" flag for counting new, cancelled, net sections
• Policies in-force count in accounting time base (previously available only in accident/pro-rata time base)
• Item counting days from last outstanding claim estimate change
• Client count in snapshot
• Items of FGU (from ground up) claims incurred for finding claims that rose over a threshold in report period
• Bordereau sums insured for policy transaction list
• Bordereau outstanding value for claim outstanding change list
• Full Storno (reversal) support
• New/renewal policy as a dimension
• Earned adjusted policies / sections in accounting
• Optimized unearned calculation templates to work ~75% faster
  

New report library

The report library is an essential part of our offering. It is supplied with our system and is the base for companies’ analysis. All reports in the library can be fully customized and extended by the clients. The library in this version has been completely re-written, and now contains 172 targeted insurance reports, in the following categories and sub-categories:

• Actuarial
  • Analysis
  • Triangulation
• Audit
  • Exceptions
  • Validations
• Claims
  • Activity
  • Parties
  • Reserving
  • Service
• Financial
  • Billing
  • Profit-loss
• Marketing
  • Channels
  • Other
  • Renewals
  • Sales
• Reinsurance
  • Analysis
  • Exposure
• Underwriting
  • Analysis
  • Clients
  • Pricing

The new InsFocus Report Library

The new data model, complete with the new report library, should help our current and future customers gain even deeper insights into their businesses, and improve their bottom lines.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

Today we are very excited to introduce InsFocus BI version 2.0. The new version has a ton of new features, enhancements and additions. One addition that is most exciting for us – introduction of InsFocus BI Web client. I’ll devote this blog post to the new Web client, and write a separate post about the other (exciting as well) additions.

What is InsFocus BI Web?

InsFocus BI Web is the next generation of BI clients – a super-fast viewer of reports designed for the Web from the ground up. It is not a migration of our current client to the Web, but rather a fresh start with a totally new UI that is optimized for today’s and tomorrow’s Web using the latest standards and design elements.

InsFocus BI Web is an incremental project. Already in this version, you can use InsFocus BI Web to view your report library and the company’s library, to open every InsFocus report, run it and view the results in charts and tables. In each subsequent version, we will add more features, as the technologies matures, and will eventually replace our current Windows client.

Technological aspect

InsFocus BI Web is written using ASP .NET MVC, jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3. This means that you get a super-fast browsing experience with a sleek UI designed to highlight the reports. InsFocus BI Web supports:

• Internet Explorer 9.0+ (Windows)
• Google Chrome (Windows/Mac)
• Mozilla Firefox (Windows/Mac)
• Apple Safari (Windows/Mac/iPad)

The client is totally zero footprint, requiring no installation and no plug-ins.

Login

The login page to InsFocus BI Web is the expected login page, with a few additional aspects:

• Custom branding – allows adding your own company logo.
• Editable information – administrators can added information such as support phone and e-mail to the screen.
• Announcements mechanism – a mechanism for floating system announcements, such as new features, new data items or planned maintenance times.

Welcome screen

InsFocus BI Web’s welcome screen is the gateway to InsFocus BI, displayed when logging in and containing:

• Reports most used by user, including thumbnails
• Recent reports used
• New company reports
• Announcements

Report library

InsFocus BI Web’s report library displays the user’s and the company’s reports, including:

• Report categories tree
• Reports as thumbnails (tile view) or as list (details view)
• Report details vertical panel with report preview, details and description
• Search for reports

Report

Viewing reports is easy with InsFocus BI Web – just double-click a report in report library or select it and click Open. The report immediately opens and runs. Features of the report:

• Multiple tabs for easy switching between reports
• Header with report name, valid date, last run date and more report details
• Task pane with report parameters and description
• View data in tables or charts
• Resize panes (tables/charts)
• Float over items in table to display tooltip or expand to base items

Other

There are many other details on InsFocus BI Web, some related to its backend and some to the user flow. I will mention a few:

• Settings screen shows connection details and allows changing password
• Data last update date is always shown on top-right corner
• Dedicated area for customer branding
• Running application in multiple browser tabs is supported.
• By leveraging latest technologies (HTML5,CSS3) we ensure both high performance and BI quality on Web.

We are positive the new Web client will be highly useful for our customers in many scenarios, and we are eager to receive your feedback on it. We believe that this new client, combined with the new version features I will discuss in the next blog post, will help in making InsFocus BI an even more compelling options for insurance companies.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

InsFocus will be represented by CEO Mr. Uri Taiber and local Head of Business Development Mr. Mitesh Matani.

During the summit, Mr. Taiber is scheduled to give an inspiring speech on the added value of expert BI systems to insurance companies profitability.

Mr. Taiber is a veteran insurance expert, as the General Manager of Zion Insurance Company, one of Israel's first insurance companies (founded 1935) and holds an MBA degree from IMEDE Switzerland and a B.Sc. degree in computer engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Insurance Technology 3rd Annual Summit 2012

Contact us today for more information on upcoming events.

Yaron Gabriel,

International Sales Director

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

Bituach Haklai, one of Israel’s oldest insurance companies, has approached us about a year ago with a need to replace their BI system. We have started a project under tight schedule, and completed both policies and claims in less than 6 months.

After this period, we set up reports, trained users and added more content according to their demands. The system is now already in heavy use by executives in different levels in the company, providing meaningful insight into their data.

You can read more in the official press release.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

Quoting some of the key sentences:

• “…enable BI users to become more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT organization”
• “…78% of respondents stated that they needed a faster time to value from BI solutions”
• “…companies are looking for alternative approaches to BI”
• “One approach is to set up an environment in which the information workers can create and access specific sets of BI reports, queries, and analytics themselves—without IT intervention”
• “Support for such sophisticated analyses, as well as making results easy to publish in the required format, greatly improves the productivity of a company’s information workers.”

InsFocus has been built from day one to be an insurance professional’s self-service BI. InsFocus’ clients are insurance company professionals, mostly business users creating their own reports and analysis and deriving real business value from the system’s built-in insurance analytics.

Read the complete TDWI report at http://tdwi.org/research/2011/07/best-practices-report-q3-self-service-business-intelligence/asset.aspx?tc=assetpg or learn more about InsFocus’ self-service BI capabilities.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

User levels

In this version, we introduce a new concept named User levels. This feature broadens the reach of InsFocus and allows the company to define different access levels to different users. There are now three user levels in the system:

• Full Users – Those are the power users in the company, professionals who create reports, change report definitions, save reports in public or private libraries and perform advanced analytics.
• View Users – These users can only open reports from the public library and view their real-time results. This level of users may be appropriate for the mass of business users whom the company does not wish to provide with report editing functionalities.
• Schedule Recipients – These are users that can only receive scheduled reports by email. They cannot connect to the system and do not have it installed. This level is suitable to staff users or agents for whom the company wants to provide pre-defined content on a “push” basis.

User role definitions can be further controlled using the system’s existing Roles definition mechanism.

Report scheduling enhancements

The report schedule mechanism has been greatly enhanced with new features;

• Multiple users – Power users having the required privileges can schedule the same report to many users. Each user will receive the report that is run under its own credentials. Thus a power user can create one report template for mailing to branch managers and each recipient will see the report showing their information.
• Recovery after ETL finishes – Users might schedule reports to run at times when an ETL process is running. In this case the reports are kept pending and once the ETL process finishes, those reports are run and sent to the user.
• Report schedule editing – Users can edit report schedule definitions including altering run times, recipients and notes.

Reporting in different currency

InsFocus has sophisticated multi-currency support. Each transaction is kept in the data warehouse in the company’s base currency, allowing for uniform reporting, while keeping the option of conversion to the original transaction currency.

We now added a feature that enables reporting in a different currency using any pre-defined currency conversion scheme. This is very helpful where the company needs to report in different currencies than its base currency, such as reporting to reinsurers in US Dollars. Conversion can be defined based on daily rate, end of month , mid quarter, or any other rate of exchange required.

Revamped system center users management

For version 1.94 we introduce a revamped users management screen in the system center.

This new screen adds users’ management capabilities for better and easier administration:

• Filter row allows filtering on all columns for long user lists
• Sorting by each users’ properties
• Batch updating of users properties
• Duplicate button for creating a user similar to another
• Last access column helps quickly identify inactive users
• Administrators now have the ability to choose “User must change password at next login”

Other improvements

1.94 contains many more useful features, amongst them:

• Risk codes selective syncing – This feature is useful in cases where risk codes contain very long value lists (for example, there can be thousands of car models). To enable easy filtering on those risk codes, users can now use an auto-complete box to select values.
• Half-year triangulation – Triangulation is an advanced actuarial calculation unique to InsFocus. It allows comparing one time axis to another in order to compose development statistics and extrapolate data using Chain-Ladder statistics. This feature has now been improved to enable analysis of non-symmetric time axes (e.g. accident years vs. development quarters) and to create analysis based on half-yearly development periods (in addition to years, quarters, months).
• Invert time axis order – A new control that allows setting time axes display order – from recent to past or the other way around.
• Notes in Excel connector – Dynamic data received in Excel connector can now include report header and notes.
• Dynamic CSV export – This new feature requested by insurers may be useful for automatic processes that need to receive data from InsFocus. Using this mechanism, any SOA enabled application can query InsFocus BI and receive back report results in CSV (in addition to HTML that was available before).
• Valid date in title bar – In order to enhance visibility of report’s valid date, it is now embedded in the report title bar.
• Repeat N periods – InsFocus’ time definitions mechanism is very flexible and allows defining any report period, and repeating this period back N years, quarters, etc. The new version adds the ability to repeat N periods as defined, meaning you can dynamically define a report, for example, for 4 months, then the previous 4 months and so on.

For further inquiries on the new version and its new features, visit www.insfocus.com or contact us at info@insfocus.com.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

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

Today we are happy to announce that we were recertified as a Microsoft Partner – Independent Software Solution competency.

We have been a Microsoft provider since 2004, and a certified partner since 2006. Microsoft has now changed its partner certifications, and partners are now asked to carry on even more detailed testing of the applications, and again submit customer references. Having our main product, InsFocus BI, pass those tests, and having submitted the customer references, has again earned us the partner credentials.

You can read the full press release here - http://www.insfocus.com/press/microsoftpartner.html.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com