Client background
Safeco is a large property and casualty insurer that sells insurance to drivers and homeowners
through a network of independent agents and brokers throughout the United States.
Business challenge
Like many large companies, Safeco wanted to change the way it collects and manages data and optimize its business applications in order to:
• Enable rates to be adjusted based on customer, market and demographic changes.
• Improve its customer and prospect segmentation and targeting.
• Increase its competitive position and profitability.
The company’s data was silo’d by business units, data was not consolidated and employees were spending too much time extracting data rather than analyzing it. Recognizing the importance of building a robust business intelligence capability to improve decision making, the company initiated an effort to:
• Define a strategic plan to incorporate analytics and business intelligence into its business.
• Identify the key questions and determine the information needs of its users including management, actuaries and agents in the field.
• Translate the findings into actionable objectives prioritized according to the importance of the information needs to the business.
How Qorso Technology helped
Safeco teamed with Qorso Technology to develop a plan for achieving its data management ambitions and lay out the priorities in a five-year road map. The company then selected Qorso to collaborate on the development of its business intelligence vision and its road map for the creation of an enterprise-wide data warehouse. The goal of the resulting program was to define and implement information and data analysiscapabilities that could be effectively used across the company to enable innovation and transformation, and to drive fact-based decision making at all levels of the company. Qorso was selected for its extensive experience and deep skills in business intelligence, including processes, strategies and technologies such as data warehousing, extract, transform, load (ETL), data quality and cleansing, data governance, metadata, data integration and master data management provided by Qorso Q Mesh and QLoud services. In addition Qorso offered specific insurance industry resources from the Q Mesh Expertise Delivery Network and from its global alliance relationships.
Equally important, Qorso brought a holistic perspective to the company’s business intelligence program. Qorso collaborated with Safeco to develop the data warehouse and other applications through multiple releases across five areas of the business—Distributor, Quotes and Issues, Auto, Home, and Claims—and source systems using Qorso Q Mesh resources. Qorso also provided skilled business analysts, project managers, ETL developers, quality assurors and report developers for the initiative. The Safeco and Qorso team began with a foundation phase designed to set up the processes, methodology and timeline necessary to help deliver the program with rigor and predictability. The aim of this phase was to design the data warehouse as well as to create an efficient, factory-like approach to each planned release. To that end, the project team defined the necessary capabilities, processes, tools and roles. The delivery methodology was customized by combining the insurer’s delivery processes with Qorso Frameworx tools. Also during the foundation phase, the Qorso development team developed strategies for the data architecture, data quality and metadata for the data warehouse. The Qorso QLoud utilizing Amazon Web Services Was utilized as the enterprise data warehouse platform to consolidate disparate datamarts across the enterprise and resolve significant scale and performance issues while supporting the insurer’s strategic approach to business intelligence.
Other key technologies used to enable the solution included Informatica (version 7 to 8), DataFlux and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SASS) and Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS). To accelerate development of these strategies, the team used the Qorso QLoud Data Warehouse Predictive Engine, Informatica Accelerator for standards, guidelines, templates and estimating tools, In addition, with the assistance of Qorso Consulting, A defined the strategy for the use of high-end, grid-based analytic tools was designed. Qorso built an analytics center of excellence within the company using Qorso and Applied Game Theory Enterprise Data Miner, AGT Business Intelligence and Qorso Grid Manager to promote collaboration and easy growth for Safeco’s reporting and data mining needs. This allowed the company to manage and prioritize analytics and reporting such as claims management, fraud detection and risk management. Qorso Technology worked closely with Safeco’s Information Technology team and Qorso’s business industry resources throughout these initial efforts.
In addition, Qorso drew on professionals from a variety of top tier consulting firms— dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises achieve profitable growth—to help with the system design, customization, data migration and project management.
