Business

Every day, senior executives in the insurance industry must make complex, business-critical decisions that take into account a wide array of performance metrics and market intelligence. Facing rigorous regulation and complex information-rich value chains, insurance companies have an absolute need for detailed, granular knowledge of what is happening in their operations, together with an ability to analyze this information in real time to investigate specific events, emerging trends and future what-if scenarios.

In many cases, the difficulty of achieving world-class business intelligence (BI) in insurance is compounded by insurers’ legacy information assets. At the same time, ongoing change in consumers, competition and capabilities means insurance businesses face growing pressure to break down their traditional, rigid information silos.

According to Accenture research on information management in Europe and North America, 75 percent of CIOs plan to have a full enterprise-wide information management strategy in place within three years while nearly 60 percent see BI as core to competitive differentiation.

To help insurers meet these pressures and move toward high performance, Accenture Information Management Services has developed the Accenture Business Intelligence (BI) Solution for Insurance—an integrated suite of applications that meets insurers’ need for business intelligence all the way from raw data metrics to detailed what-if analytics. The solution integrates fully with industry-standard systems—it is built on the Business Objects platform, and will be made available for other platforms such as SAS, Cognos and Microsoft.

The Accenture BI Solution for
Insurance consists of three parts:

• Enterprise Metrics Management
(EMM). A unique offering encompassing the strategy, process and technology components needed to ensure quick access to appropriate and consistent performance metrics via tailored, rules-based executive dashboards. Comprised of 200 data
metrics coupled with a data connector and a virtually preconfigured portal, EMM can be implemented swiftly and efficiently in any insurer. By leveraging Accenture’s
pre-configured tool, insurance industry knowledge and experience in determining the right metrics to include, insurance companies can avoid ”reinventing the wheel” and
save millions on their technology investment.

• Reporting.
Comprehensive reporting capabilities based on Web intelligence reports that drill down to the enterprise metrics and provide detailed and flexible real-time intelligence on the company’s performance against any chosen indicators. The reporting is structured in a logical and hierarchical way, enabling executives to conduct root cause investigations to the most granular level at the click of a button.

•What-if analytics and scenario
planning. Sophisticated modeling capabilities, enabling performance data drawn from the EMM and reporting modules to be tested and trailed against changes in any chosen
combination of variables. This enables executives to model in advance the impact and interdependencies that would arise from any given management action. Insurers using
the Accenture BI Solution for Insurance find that this capability rapidly establishes itself as an invaluable and indispensable tool for decision support across all areas of the business.