Information Builders Offers New Insurance Performance Foundation

Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced an upgrade of its Insurance Performance Foundation (IPF), previously known as Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF). IPF provides performance management, collaboration, and role and dashboard management capabilities requested by many property and casualty CEOs. With new structured ad hoc reporting, the newly modularized IPF provides insurance companies such as the Mid-Continent Group with access to the full breadth of insurance business information, from summary to the lowest level of detail, required to give a single, accurate view of the business.

"Our CEO took a hands-on approach with IPF because it was key to helping him realize his vision to have a dashboard allowing him to drill down into finer details of results, confidently mine data looking at sub-classes of business and pockets of geographic locations to enable us to improve the results of our book," said Gregg Jones, chief financial officer at Mid-Continent Group. "The IPF will enable us to provide a consistent, confident, single view to our business results that was previously missing."

Insurance executives now receive pre-packaged dashboards showing performance against goals and can readily personalize content to identify concerns with a few clicks. Online collaboration on metrics and performance provides users with the ability to enhance company-wide information, including sharing of judgments, actions, and accountability for more informed decision-making across the business. Reports can be brought to the user based on a schedule or user thresholds, allowing executives to be proactive in looking at only the most relevant business information.

With a more engaging user interface, IPF's new property and casualty reporting families are designed to empower even the most non-technical user to answer questions and perform real-time segmentation across underwriting, actuary, and claims areas with:

--  Visual effects where drop-down lists in information requests better
    reflect the insurers' business relationships and hierarchies
--  Preferred defaults, so users see the best context for that information
--  Enhanced search capabilities to provide easier filtering of large drop-
    down lists like agent, provider, or county
--  Ability to recall previous requests and evolve in real time
--  Off-line analytics capabilities, enabling brokers, and traveling staff
    to perform property and casualty analytics without connecting to the server

Heightened competition brought on by the challenging economy is driving insurers to save money now, while improving strategic use of information to reduce loss ratios over time. To accommodate this market trend, IPF is offered as four components that can be acquired one at a time or all together. As a modular solution IPF can complement existing insurance data warehouse efforts or deliver a complete data warehouse and BI solution. This flexibility differs from traditional insurance frameworks, because it means IPF can be implemented in months, not years. The four components of IPF include:

--  Executive performance-oriented key performance indicators
--  Management reporting frameworks
--  Insurance data model (detail to summary full dimensional model)
--  Prebuilt insurance data movement services (ETL) to load data model

"It's our goal to help users be more self-sufficient to not only take the burden off IT and keep costs low, but also give each user the ability to be a more active and valuable contributor to the organization," said Information Builders founder and CEO Gerald Cohen. "Our deep property and casualty expertise continues to provide insurers with rapid options and powerful segmentation to lower expense ratios."

IPF now supports workers compensation and surety insurers in addition to personal, commercial, and excess and surplus lines. The solution is available immediately with flexible pricing options, which range from as low as $250K for just the data model to $500K for the full package solution.

About Information Builders

Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets.