Situation

This Wisconsin-based commercial insurance agency had data from which to make informed decisions, but it was time-consuming and labor-intensive to access. When the agency wanted a report or other information from its data, it went through a lot of manual manipulation to get the data out of its source systems, put it into spreadsheets, build pivot tables, and on and on until a report was in a format that could be useful for answering the questions at hand. This process not only took a lot of time and effort, but it also left the door open to potential errors given all the manual manipulation that data went through—not an ideal situation for evaluating key indicators of your business’s health!

Strategy

Utilizing its knowledge of the insurance industry, Wipfli’s insurance team helped the agency set up a QlikView business intelligence (BI) system that significantly enhanced the access to data and presented “reports” (in the form of charts and graphs) across branches and business areas without manual data manipulation. Starting with its financials (e.g., assets and liabilities, profit and loss), Wipfli trained the company’s employees to access and easily review the data they were seeing in the old reports in new ways. They also learned how to drill down into the data without having to request additional reports multiple times or wait for them to be physically revised. In addition, Wipfli helped the agency through the development of reporting applications related to producers (agents), which gave them insight into their own books of business (i.e., profitability, expenses).

Benefits

While Wipfli delivered some initial applications, it also provided the agency with the education needed to use and explore the system independently. The organization has been successfully up and running with QlikView for over two years, and it continues to enhance and develop the ways in which it can use the system on its own. Beyond eliminating the manual processes, the big benefit that was achieved is better, and continual, insight into its business, which facilitates collaborative business decisions and improves its ability to solve business problems.