Case Study

Permanent General Assurance Corporation (PGAC) implements Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence Solution to improve depth, breadth and reliability of structured and ad-hoc reporting.

June 2008

Background

Permanent General Assurance Corporation (PGAC), headquartered in Tennessee, provides "non-standard" or "specialty" auto insurance. During the past several years PGAC has aggressively expanded and now writes auto insurance in 18 states, up from 7 states just 3 years ago. This growth, combined with PGAC's profitability objective, has helped to create strong demand for reliable, accurate, detailed and timely reporting.

Business Challenge

To prepare for a successful implementation, PGAC had to reconcile their transactional source data to their financials, select a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence vendor and create a cross-functional, knowledgeable team with sufficient time allocated to the project.

PGAC preferred to buy and customize a packaged solution rather than build a solution internally from scratch. By the end of 2005, the PGAC IT team, working closely with the business users, created a short list of Data Warehouse & Business Intelligence vendors. PGAC selected Pinpoint Solutions, based out of Livingston, NJ because of their solutions' concentration on and customization for the Insurance industry.

Working closely with Pinpoint's staff, PGAC documented the detail behind their requirements to include:

• dimensional definitions defined at the transactional level
• over 110 dimensions
• over 150 measure calculations, including proprietary algorithms
• historical transactional data volumes reaching 500 million rows
• reporting for the actuarial, pricing, marketing, financial & claims.

Successful Implementation

Pinpoint and PGAC together implemented the ProfitCube^® solution and shortly after, the Quotagon product "add-on". The comprehensive solution is now covering actuarial, pricing/underwriting, financial, claims and marketing subject areas. The ProfitCube implementation went live in 2007 and took slightly more than one year and included a data warehouse, multi-dimensional model, reporting library and the automated operational procedures to support the data migration.

Several techniques used during the projects which helped insure success, included:

• Insuring that all nouns were consistently defined throughout the organization and any inconsistencies were separated into different nouns (measures or dimensions) as appropriate.
• Insuring there was a reliable methodology and supporting information for testing before any development began.
• Having IT resources on the Project Team who understood the historical issues and business meaning associated with the detail data.
• Identifying and empowering an owner of data quality to sponsor any required modifications and/or data related decisions.
• Insuring that the development team had hard copies or electronic copy samples of any "critical" reports or analyses required for a successful implementation.

PGAC achieved the following benefits within the first 6 months of ProfitCube use:

• Improved reporting access, reliability, consistency and timeliness. Through the extremely multidimensional drill around capabilities, several spikes were uncovered, root causes identified, and changes implemented to improve results.
• The actuarial staff can now answer ad-hoc business questions in a more timely and reliable manner.
• The actuarial staff can now more confidently and precisely explain what is causing a particular spike found at the summary level.
• The actuarial staff can more efficiently support statistical reporting. Product (Underwriting) can more quickly & efficiently support rate revisions for a growing number of states.
• Product (Underwriting) can more efficiently monitor portfolio exposure balance and concentration.
• PGAC is now making more reliable and informed business decisions each and every day.

PGAC ProfitCube^® and Quotagon Architecture

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Continuing the Efficiency — PGAC Implements Quotagon

In May of 2008, PGAC also implemented Pinpoint's Quotagon product; a comprehensive reporting and analysis solution that analyzes Sales and Quotes, Submissions and Pricing details. Quotagon is providing PGAC's marketing team with the ability to more smartly manage their distribution and market more profitable business.

Conclusion

With the right team, reconciled data, and the right packaged Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence application set, PGAC implemented two customized, off-the-shelf solutions that helped improve business results. The executive and management staff at PGAC are making more reliable business decisions on a more timely basis, which is sure to help to improve business results and profits in hard, soft and volatile markets.

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