Customers

Rockhill

Rockhill Logo"BusinessObjects gives you the foresight to make better decisions, better investments, and better allocation of resources."

Seth Manchik, Senior Systems Analyst
Rockhill Insurance

Challenge

Established from an underwriting management group in late 2005, Kansas City, Missouri-based Rockhill Insurance Company offers commercial enterprises five basic lines of insurance- primary general liability, primary property, hurricane and wind, umbrella and excess liability, and excess property. Additionally, Rockhill recently acquired RTW, a Bloomington, Minnesota-based company specializing in the workers' compensation industry.

Faced with rapid growth through acquisition and new business, Rockhill realized it needed to grow beyond the spreadsheet-based method of reporting and analysis its underwriters depended on. The company required more flexible reporting than Excel could offer, and a greater depth of insight into data stored in multiple information systems, including accounting, policies and claims, fixed assets, payroll, and timekeeper systems. Rockhill decision-makers wanted a solution to help them quickly analyze and understand how business was doing at any point in time.

A key goal for Rockhill was to be able to readily compare pricing with industry benchmarks, specifically, the Insurance Services Office (ISO) rates. Rockhill sought a business intelligence (BI) solution to establish a more accurate gauge as to how it prices its products relative to the marketplace. Seth Manchik, senior systems analyst and BI lead at Rockhill, explains, "If we're not pricing our product correctly in a given market, then we're going to lose quality business or not be able to generate revenue. So seeing where we compare to the benchmark ISO rates is very important to us."

Approach

Rockhill selected BusinessObjects™ Enterprise XI as its BI platform, which includes the InfoView portal and BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®. Rockhill uses Web Intelligence as its primary reporting engine, tapping into its interactive query and analysis capabilities. Rockhill's initial goals were to provide reporting and analysis for accounting, underwriting, and actuarial, and to build a BusinessObjects universe that enables multidimensional views of business data. Eventually Rockhill will incorporate Crystal Xcelsius™ in its mix of Business Objects products, to leverage that product's multidimensional analysis and visualization capabilities.

Manchik notes that although Rockhill focuses on developing reporting and analytics for about 30 users in underwriting, accounting, and actuarial departments, everyone in the company is potentially an end user. Ultimately, Rockhill intends to roll out Web Intelligence reports to the entire company, including subsidiaries. Although still in the early stages of its BI reporting initiative, most of Rockhill's reporting is now done through Web Intelligence. "Our initiative has been to establish a data warehouse with an underlying foundation of solid data, and to meet basic reporting requirements," says Manchik. "We've built data marts that feed the Business Objects universes, and we're using ISO data for our underwriting algorithms and to compare our benchmark rating."

Results

Enhanced Reporting and Analytics

The transition from spreadsheets to a BI reporting engine is a challenge for any organization. Coming from an actuarial math background, Manchik understands the love of spreadsheets as a primary user interface—but that was before he'd worked with a BI reporting platform. "I could do almost anything with a spreadsheet, but I soon learned how limited it was for organizing and processing data, " he says. "With BusinessObjects, it's so much easier to manage and support analytics. Web Intelligence is a perfect hybrid of a database and a spreadsheet. The user can function with prompts and do all the things that are very difficult, if not impossible, to do in a spreadsheet. Coupled with the scheduling and the automated functions of InfoView, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence has made my world a lot easier."

Greater Flexibility

Rockhill now produces about 40 cyclical reports that previously didn't exist because the spreadsheets lacked flexibility, the data wasn't organized, and end users couldn't envision the types of reports that are now possible. Manchik says, "There was never a universe with a multitude of data objects from which users can pick and choose their analytics. Now, with access to an encyclopedia of the data objects in each universe, they're able to see what they can do with the data."

Early reporting successes have spurred interest among Rockhill's executive end users, who are clamoring for new reports. "Once they've seen what's possible, they want more. It's hard to keep up with the requests," says Manchik. He notes that keeping up with report requests is a challenge that will dissipate as more people become trained on the Business Objects products, and users can take advantage of dashboards. Additionally, once a report has been developed, Manchik sets it up to run automatically on a cyclical basis, freeing him to focus on other work.

Saving Time-and Letting Managers Be Managers

The BI initiative has resulted in tremendous timesavings for Rockhill. "BusinessObjects has saved us hundreds of hours per year," says Manchik. "One of our top risk managers was spending 40 hours a quarter per product developing the board metrics for each product in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint documents. We've completely automated that into a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report that folds in via Live Office into the same PowerPoint document—so that saves him 160 hours per quarter. We have similar stories for a number of individuals across our organization." The expedited reporting capabilities free up end users to focus on role-related tasks. For example, the risk manager is now working with underwriters and actuaries on developing more metrics and analytics. Manchik says, "Now, he can be a risk manager and not a report developer. With Web Intelligence, our underwriters, managers, and analysts can do the jobs for which they were hired in the first place."

"I've always thought that the first priority of BI should be to enable people, like the risk manager," says Manchik. "BusinessObjects enables him to do his job better and it enables underwriters to be better underwriters, and accountant's better accountants." He adds that the better reporting helps Rockhill nurture long-term relationships with customers, rather than overlook them as transactions.

Competitive Advantage

Rockhill sees its BI initiative as a competitive advantage that enables it to anticipate market changes and act accordingly. Moving forward, the company intends to roll out dashboards for executives, underwriters, and actuaries, incorporating geographical information as well as ISO data and catastrophe analytics. Manchik notes, "Currently we have a solid production universe in place, claims universes, and product universes, from which we've developed Web Intelligence reports. Our focus for 2008 is going to be heavily into the dashboard management and performance management arena." Rockhill will use Xcelsius, BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, and BusinessObjects Performance Manager to create highly interactive dashboards, allowing managers and underwriters to explore cubes of data.

Rockhill is in the process of integrating ISO data into rating algorithms and the universes, to enrich pricing analytics. With BusinessObjects, Rockhill can tap into the wealth of market data, work with it interactively, and see the juxtaposition of the business it writes and where it compares to ISO benchmarks—a capability that helps Rockhill differentiate itself competitively. Manchik explains, "With dashboards and an interactive environment like Xcelsius, we can see patterns and details that enable us to adjust prices, and also to adjust our strategy for underwriting as a whole. Ultimately the goal is to be able to ask any question and have it answered quickly."

Business Objects has transformed the way Rockhill does business. "The underwriters and senior executives of this company realize the importance of data and the importance of a solid BI foundation," Manchik says. "If an organization doesn't embrace proactive analytics and making decisions using deeply insightful analytics, you can't do anything but really respond to the market and say, ‘Well, I wish we would have known that before.' BusinessObjects eliminates that from happening. It gives you the foresight to make better decisions, better investments, and better allocations of resources." He notes that the transition from spreadsheets to BI is a culture shift, but a crucial one. "Getting senior executives to espouse a culture that adapts to change is critical to success," Manchik says. "We're beginning to get that at Rockhill."

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