Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Insurance Company Improves Operational Efficiency 25 Percent by Improving Data Access
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Insurance
Customer Profile
Grange Insurance Group is a 100-year-old insurance company thatoperates insixWestern states in the United States. It specializes in insuring families in towns, suburbs, and farming communities.
Business Situation
To ensure data consistency and facilitate data management for business benefit, Grange Insurance Group required an enterprisewide database application to act as a central repository for all lines of the business.
Solution
Grange engaged Tata Consultancy Services to deliver an end-to-end business intelligence and data warehousing solution that would gather detailed business and systems requirements for Grange. Tata used its Insurance-Business Intelligence for Decision Support, which is based on Microsoft®SQL Server™ 2000.
Benefits
Faster access to data
Uniformity in report generation
Improved efficiency by 25 percent / “The solution populates the data without human intervention, which has improved in-house administration and increased organizational efficiency.”
Ralph Carlile, VicePresident and Chief Information Officer, Grange Insurance Group
Grange Insurance Group is a mid-sized personal and commercial insurance company that caters to farming communities and suburban areas in the United States. Grange operates in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming,Colorado, and California. The company has more than U.S.$190 million in assets.To facilitate business growth,Grange commissioned Microsoft®Gold Certified Partner Tata Consultancy Services to consolidate its existing systems and business processes. Tata Consultancy Services’s proprietary methodology, the Insurance-Business Intelligence for Decision Support, is a framework for data analysis and data warehousing.Grange has been able to substantially improve its efficiency due to the enterprisewide database solutionbased on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000. In fact, the company has recorded a 25 percent productivity increase due to the new analytics and reporting solution.
Situation
Grange Insurance Group has been providing dependable, competitively priced insurance coverage to farm and ranch families for over 100 years. Grange aims to become the best regional property casualty insurance company in the Western United States. Its corporate office is located in Seattle, Washington.
In April 1994, the Grange celebrated its centennial year. Over the first100 years,the companyhas committed itself to the special needs of families in towns, farming communities, and suburban areas.Today, it provides coverage for farm dwellings and private structures, household personal property, farm buildings and structures, farm machinery and equipment, livestock, farm personal property, comprehensive personal liability, and farm liability.
Over the years, Grangehas accumulated large volumes of data across multiple, disparate solutions and databases. The company's executives felt the need to organize the data into a single source and create a seamless integrated solution, to ensure data consistency and permit advanced data management for the business's benefit.
Prior to the deployment of the business solution, Grange evaluated IBM mainframesamong other popular online analytical processing (OLAP) tools for the analytics and reporting solution.
Solution
Grange engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop the enterprise database that would form a central repository for all lines of business. TCS consultants recommended that the data be extracted from legacy systems to a Microsoft® SQL Server™2000 database. Microsoft SQL Server, which is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, was chosen due to Grange's in-house capability to manage and maintain SQL Server. Also, Microsoft SQL Server 2000database is enhanced byMicrosoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services.
TCS put together a team ofproject managers, functional experts for understanding business processes, business intelligence solution architects, database experts, and developers. Several operational systems at Grange were already maintained and supported by TCS. TCS capitalized on this experience in architecting and delivering the solution.
Based on the systems and requirement study, TCS recommended a three-tier architecture to address the analytical requirements at Grange. Grange executivesdecided to use iBIDS (Insurance–Business Intelligence for Decision Support), a TCS business intelligence and data warehousing framework built usingSQL Server 2000. The data from Grange legacy applications was transformed and transported to the centralized repository throughstored procedures.
iBIDS facilitates the business intelligence process. iBIDS framework includes standards, guidelines, and a checklist to define the entry and exit criteria for each step in the software development lifecycle. In addition, iBIDSprovides best practices and solution assets encompassing the entire spectrum of business intelligenceimplementation services. For example, it has specific delivery frameworks for quality management, metadata management, data migration, case modeling, and performance management which were used at various stages of the software development lifecycle.
The combined Grange and TCS team decided on a phased implementation approach. In the first phase, TCS migrated the data from various legacy sources into a single enterprisewide SQL Server–based database.
In the second phase, the team transported the data to subject-specific data marts and OLAP cubes. iBIDS has a logical data model that supports analytical templates such as sales and marketing, customer service, underwriting, actuarial (product pricing, product definition, valuation),claims analysis, finance, and investment.
Summary tables were derived from the transactional tables and subject-specific data marts were designed for faster and accurate analysis. These data marts are used for current, as well as future, analytic, and reporting needs.
The solution employs anindependent and reusable reporting infrastructure throughMicrosoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
For the solution to be successful, it was important that all users had the relevant training and knowledge of the system. To ensure this, TCS provided not only user training and support, but it also helped the company go live on the solution, personally aiding the employees through post-implementation on-site support.
“TCS provided a group of talented analysts and developers that made the design and execution of a complete business intelligence strategy possible. TCS employed its iBIDs methodology to achieve a rapid implementation. The ability of TCS consultants to quickly learn the business requirements and apply the appropriate technology to enable these requirements was exceptional," explains Ralph Carlile, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Grange Insurance Group.
Benefits
Grange has streamlined its business processes and has made data available that is imperative for its employees to make smarter decisions. This improved data availability has led to an increase in employee efficiency. “The data warehouse and subsequent business intelligence initiatives have provided us with the ability to rapidly access and analyze business situationsand identify data trends. This capability did not exist before and would not have been possible without the talent of TCS,” comments Carlile.
Faster Access to Data
Previously,Grange employees did not have access to consolidated data. Each time Grange staff membersrequired data, the IT team would writea COBOL program to pull the data from the mainframe. A simple request could take as long asan astounding 20 days.
With the new solution, Grange personnel have OLAP cubes and data warehousing that enable them to access 100 percent of data in an organized manner—on an as-needed basis—within just a few minutes.
Uniformity in Report Generation
Previously, Grange had multiple data sources in disparate databases. Thus,creating reports was a time-consuming process.TCS understood Grange'sfinancial analysis and reporting needs and delivered a single consolidated database and reporting solution. TCS capitalized on its off-shore resourcesto reduce the time and cost elements of the project, while maintaining CMM Level-5-quality processes. This enables Grange employees to merge data from various data sources to pull a spreadsheet-formatted report created with the Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software and other analytical tools.
The uniformity in report generation has helped the organization save as much as between 25to 40 percent ofthe time previously required to generate reports.
Increased Efficiency by 25Percent
The legacy solutions did not introducebest practices or processes to generate business or data analysis. Also, there was no reporting solution to create analysis such as year-on-year or month-on-month.
The TCS solution automates the process and generates reports throughExcel 2003.“The solution populates the data without human intervention, which has improved in-house administration and increased organizational efficiency,” commentsCarlile.
About Tata Consultancy Services
TCS is a division of Tata Sons, the holding company of the U.S.$13 billion Tata Group. The Tata Group is India's best-known and respected business conglomerate, and is also a leader and pioneer in a variety of industry segments and corporate social responsibilities.
TCS is a transnational company whose service offerings straddle many different industries, including finance and banking, insurance, telecommunications, transportation, retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and utilities. TCS's clients include small, medium, and large companies, and its consulting engagements vary from a few person-months to hundreds of person-years in effort.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: