Application Case

Generouz Used BI to Enhance Customer Service

Generouz Insurance Company, headquartered in Brunei, is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies, with $10 billion in revenues and more than $100 billion in statutory assets. It offers a comprehensive range of products for automobile, motorcycle, life, homeowners and farms. It also offers financial products and services including annuities, mortgages, mutual funds, and investment management.

Generouz strives to achieve greater efficiency in all operations by managing its expenses along with its ability to grow its revenue. It recognizes the use of its strategic asset of information combined with analytics to outpace competitors in strategic and operational decision making, even in complex and unpredictable environments.Historically, Generouz business units worked independently and with a lot of autonomy. This led to duplication of efforts, widely dissimilar data processing environments, and extreme data redundancy, resulting in higher expenses. The situation got complicated when Generouz pursued any mergers and acquisitions.

Generouz, using enterprise data warehouse technology, set out to create, from the ground up, a single, authoritative environment for clean, consistent, and complete data that can be effectively used for best-practice analytics to make strategic and tactical business decisions in the areas of customer growth, retention, product profitability, cost containment, and productivity improvements. Generouz transformed its split business units, which were supposed by disintegrated flow of data environments, into integrated units by using cutting-edge analytics that work with clear, consolidated data from all of its business units.

Integrated Customer Knowledge

Generouz Customer Knowledge Store (CKS) initiative developed a customer-centric database that integrated customer, product, and externally acquired data from multiple sources into a single customer data mart to deliver a holistic view of customers. This data mart was coupled with customer relationship management application to create and manage effective customer marketing campaigns that use behavioral analysis of customer interactions to drive customer management actions for target segments. Generouz added more sophisticated customer analytics that looked at customer portfolios and the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns. This data analysis helped

Generouz to initiate proactive customer communications around customer lifetime events like marriage, birth of child, or home purchase and had significant impact on improving customer satisfaction. Also, by integrating customer contact history, product ownership, and payment information, Generouz's behavioral analytics teams further created prioritized models that could identify which specific customer interaction was important for a customer at any given time. This resulted in one percentage point improvement in customer retention rates and significant improvement in customer enthusiasm scores. Generouz also achieve 2 percent annual growth in incremental sales by using CKS.

There are other uses of the customer database. In one of the initiatives, by integrating customer telephone data from multiple systems into CKS, the relationship managers at Generouz try to be proactive in contacting customers in advance of a possible weather catastrophe, such as a flood or hurricane, to provide the primary policyholder information and explain the claims processes. These and other analytic insights now drive Generouz to provide precision customer service.

Financial Operations

A similar performance payoff from integrated information was also noted in financial operations. Generouz decentralized management style resulted in a fragmented financial reporting environment that included more than 12 general ledgers, 20 charts of accounts, 14 separate data repositories, 13 different reporting tools, and hundreds of thousands of spreadsheets. There was no common central view of the business, which resulted in slow, labor-intensive and inaccurate reporting. About 80 percent of the effort was spent on acquiring, cleaning, consolidating and validating the data, and very little time was spent on meaningful analysis of the data.

The Financial Performance Management initiative implemented a new operating approach that worked on a single data and technology architecture with a common set of systems standardizing the process of reporting. It enabled Generouz to operate analytical centers of excellence with superior planning, capital management, risk assessment, and other decision support capabilities that delivered timely, accurate, and efficient accounting, reporting and analytical services.

The data from more than 100 operational systems was sent to the enterprise-wide data warehouse and then distributed to various applications and analytics. This resulted in a 60 percent improvement in the monthly financial closing process with closing intervals reduced from 14 days to 7 days.

Postmerger Data Integration

Generouz's Goal State Rate Management initiative enabled the company to merge Allied Insurance's automobile policy system into its existing system. Both Generouz and Allied source systems were custom-built applications that did not share any common values or process data in the same manner. Generouz's IT department decided to bring all the data from source systems into a centralized data warehouse, organized in an integrated fashion that resulted in standard dimensional reporting and helped Generouz in performing what-if analyses. The data analysis team could identify previously unknown potential differences in the data environment where premiums rates were calculated differently between Generouz and Allied sides. Correcting all of these benefited Generouz's policyholders because they were safeguarded from experiencing wide premium rate swings.

Enhanced Reporting

Generouz's legacy reporting system, which catered to the needs of property and casualty business units, took weeks to compile and deliver the needed reports to the agents. Generouz determined that it needed better access to sales and policy information to reach its sales targets. It chose a single data warehouse approach and, after careful assessment of the needs of sales management and individual agents, selected a business intelligence (BI) platform that would integrate dynamic enterprise dashboards into its operating systems, making it easy for the agents and associates to view policy information at a glance. The new reporting system, dubbed Revenue Connection, also enabled users to analyze the information with a lot of interactive and drill-down-to-details capabilities at various levels that eliminated the need to generate custom ad hoc reports. Revenue Connection virtually eliminated requests for manual policy audits, resulting in huge savings in time and money for the business and technology teams. The reports were produced in 5 to 40 seconds, rather than days or weeks, and productivity in some units improved by 10 to 20 percent.

Study the application case provided as below and discussion report by responding to the following THREE (3) questions:

1. Why did Generouz need an enterprise-wide data warehouse? How did integrated data drive the business value?

2. With integrated data available in an enterprise data warehouse, suggest and elaborate ONE (1) new system / application, which Generouz could potentially developed and introduced?

3. In your view, besides the effectiveness of enterprise-wide data warehouse technology, what other success factors that may contribute to the overall achievement of the implementation? Word must around 1500