InsFocus Blog

The InsFocus Advantage for Insurance Companies

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 06:04:46 +0000

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

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:21:50 +0000

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

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:33:20 +0000

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

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:54:45 +0000

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?

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:13:11 +0000

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:
1. 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.
2. 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

utaiber@insfocus.com

Microsoft Customer Satisfaction Survey Results

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:24:23 +0000

March 2010, Microsoft conducted a customer satisfaction survey of InsFocus Systems. The survey, named CSAT, is required by Microsoft for Gold Certified Partners.

12 executives and professionals from 3 different InsFocus customer companies answered the survey. Result highlights:

Net satisfaction: 191.67 out of 200, compared to MS partner average of 167.90.
Customer loyalty: All considered “Champions”.
Loyalty: 100% were satisfied, 100% were likely to recommend, 100% were likely to repurchase and 83.33% stated InsFocus has a “big” or “vital” advantage.
Performance: 75% rated overall performance at 8 or 9 out of 9 (the rest at 7). All results were above average.

View the full results by downloading the CSAT Summary PDF.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

Version 1.91 Released

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:50:00 +0000

Hi,

Today we are happy to announce the release of InsFocus BI version 1.91.

The new version puts a great emphasis on communication infrastructures, enabling easy integration with other services, various external connectors to BI data and report scheduling, all enabling users to be closer to the BI data they require.

REST communication

InsFocus BI is now fully RESTful, providing much easier SOA and new ways to integrate BI capabilities into the different company’s applications and services;

Fully RESTful interface (using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE)
Most methods use GET and can be tested from any browser
Communication is based on simple basic authentication with SSL encryption
Response format is either XML or JSON
Most important methods, such as running queries or getting user’s report list, support returning results in HTML
Many methods which return large results also support returning compressed byte streams, for fast communication

New external connectors

Based on the previous Excel connector, InsFocus BI now has new ways to connect to the BI server and run queries;

Return a query as internal InsFocus object or as HTML table
Run a query by parameters or run a report stored in server’s libraries
Pass query parameters either as structured XML or as part of the query URL
Connect from any browser or from Excel
Return HTML table with or without CSS formatting

Report scheduler

Utilizing the new communications and connectors, InsFocus BI now has a report scheduler that is able to send report results by mail and SMS;

Schedule reports to run daily, weekly or monthly
Schedule reports to run one or more times per day
Schedule reports saved in library or queries not even saved
Send results by template-based, formatted, HTML mail
Save results to HTML files
Send results by SMS directly to executive’s cell phones

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

InsFocus Teams with Dortal Software Systems

admin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:14:00 +0000

We are very pleased to announce that we have a new implementation & integration partner in Israel, Dortal Software Systems.

Dortal has many years of experience in insurance software systems and support systems for the insurance industry. Together with Dortal, we will be able to deliver significant value added to customers based in Israel.

For more information, see http://www.insfocus.com or http://www.dortal.co.il.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

Middlesea Insurance Launches Business Intelligence Solution by InsFocus

admin — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:35:00 +0000

Today we are proud to announce that Middlesea Insurance, one of the leading composite insurance companies in Malta, has chosen InsFocus as its BI (Business Intelligence) tool for all reporting, analytics & querying of its extensive product line.

Implementation of InsFocus has begun in July 2009, and it is already in daily use by different stakeholders in Middlesea. The project is scheduled to be completed by April 2010.

View the full press release at: Middlesea implements InsFocus BI.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

Version 1.9 Released

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:50:00 +0000

Today we are excited to announce the release of InsFocus BI version 1.9. The new version includes a lot of new features who all targeted at providing better analysis, deeper understanding of business situations and better manageability, including:

Support for weeks, according to ISO week
Support for day-of-week
Flexible time periods for reporting many time periods in one analysis (e.g. last month, last month last year, last year, previous year, etc.)
User restriction groups for items (measurements) and dimensions
Many more smaller additions that make day-to-day analysis better.

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