Headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa, The IMT Group offers car, home, and business insurance to policyholders throughout the Midwest. The company consists of IMT Insurance Company and Wadena Insurance Company and was founded in 1884 as a provider of wind and tornado insurance to farmers. Today, its line of personal and commercial insurance products is offered through over 800 independent agencies in six states across the Midwest.

Situation

In the spirit of continuous improvement, IMT sought to understand its book of business better and needed the ability to analyze its data in more beneficial and meaningful ways. The company recognized the need to apply technology to harness the power of information. IMT was prepared to embark on the typical yet costly data warehouse building project when Wipfli introduced the company to QlikView, a better way of gathering strategic business intelligence.

Strategy

Wipfli helped IMT with a proof-of-concept project, allowing IMT to essentially take QlikView for a test drive by applying the software to its own, real homeowners’ policy data. The opportunity quickly gave IMT some valuable insights and clearly illustrated the business value to be gained from a deployment. Once on board, Wipfli provided further assistance:

• Combined and consolidated all policyholder data to create an integrated view into policies, premiums, and claims in support of analysis across all data.
• Built out the application to create executive dashboards empowering users to quickly monitor performance and risk.
• Trained and mentored IMT’s IT staff and software users.

Benefits

Wiplfi’s QlikView solution provided IMT with the power to consolidate, search, visualize, and analyze all its data for unprecedented business insight. IMT now has a powerful business intelligence tool and avoided the costly expense and lengthy time investment required to execute a massive data warehouse project.

In addition, IMT’s QlikView users now get rapid information to make faster, smarter decisions. Such decisions are already improving the company’s customer service and loyalty, as happened in a recent claims incident when endorsement coverage questions surfaced. By quickly performing an on-the-spot historical analysis—a process that would have previously taken 48 hours or longer—IMT was able to proactively resolve the matter to the complete satisfaction of the agent and the great relief of the insured.