Information Builders Introduces Analytical Application Template for Insurance Industry
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Information Builders, a global leader in data integration, data warehousing and decision support, is introducing InfoCube for Insurance, a Web application template that delivers a high percentage of the analytical information most commonly requested by insurance industry managers. With InfoCube for Insurance, sales managers and underwriters can measure business performance by evaluating the sales of property, casualty and life insurance policies by region, office or agent.

InfoCube for Insurance was originally developed when an Information Builders customer needed to give its insurance agency managers the ability to understand their business performance issues at a glance. "InfoCube for Insurance provides virtually universal access to the type of information most agency managers need to do their jobs," says Kevin Quinn, Information Builders' director of Internet product sales. "InfoCube's eight available modules answer the most commonly asked business questions. This gives sales managers and underwriters the ability to perform their own analysis without relying on systems analysts. InfoCube's EIS-like front-end provides the necessary analytical capabilities without overwhelming the user with features," explains Quinn. "InfoCube's guided analysis and pre-constructed reports give its users a competitive advantage, because sales managers and underwriters are able to make quicker decisions based on trends in their particular areas."

The following are the InfoCube data analysis engine's eight data views:

• Maps: Organizes, visualizes and analyzes business data by geographical region.
• Ranking: Identifies the top or bottom range of any variable.
• Financials: Captures high-level financial indicators and compares them to company benchmarks.
• Over Time: Enables decision-makers to compare several variables over time, including volume of sales, units, margins and costs.
• Plan: Answers the question, "How are we doing against plan."
• Pareto: Based on Pareto's 80/20 rule which states that 80 percent of production volume typically comes from 20 percent of the producers. Pareto analysis can be applied to sales, units, margins, cost, etc.
• List: Enables management to view multiple business drivers in context to either formulate or verify hypotheses on the underlying causes for the performance of the enterprise.
• Power Grid: Offers powerful capabilities to identify undesirable dependencies. For example, "Are 40 percent of my sales from customers whose purchases this year were less than last year?"

InfoCube is 100 percent HTML-based, which makes it easy to deploy over the enterprise and easy for non-technical managers to use. "HTML is the common denominator supported by every version of every browser on every machine," explains Quinn. "Therefore, it not only resolves deployment and access issues, it also dramatically reduces training time, since using InfoCube is as easy as navigating a standard Web site."

InfoCube is an application template based on Information Builders' WebFOCUS, the industry's most powerful Web reporting system. WebFOCUS can access virtually any database on any computer platform. Its relational and nonrelational gateways enable InfoCube users to select host databases, specify fields and perform sorts, joins, calculations and aggregations.

"Thanks to WebFOCUS' built-in middleware technology, InfoCube does more than generate HTML reports, it accesses disparate databases and utilizes that information to produce historically accurate, useful reports," explains Quinn. InfoCube for Insurance can be modified to address any area of the insurance business. Two online demos are available: One specifically for insurance sales managers is available at http://www5.ibi.com/ibi_html/insure. Another for insurance underwriters can be found at http://www5.ibi.com/ibi_html/insure2.

InfoCube for Insurance is now shipping and is available through Information Builders' direct sales offices and its InfoElite channel partners.

About Information Builders

Information Builders supplies the market-leading middleware technology that enables today's Web-based systems to be integrated with enterprisewide data and applications. The company extends that technology with cutting-edge Web tools for building decision support, reporting and transaction processing applications. Headquartered in New York City, Information Builders employs more than 1,950 professionals worldwide and earned revenues exceeding $307 million in 1998. To learn more about Information Builders' products and services, point your Web browser to http://www.ibi.com.