Information Builders > Case Studies > Physicians Mutual Ensures End-User Productivity With WebFOCUS InfoAssist

Physicians Mutual Ensures End-User Productivity With WebFOCUS InfoAssist

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

WebFOCUS InfoAssist
ReportCaster
Business Intelligence Dashboard

Tech Stack

WebFOCUS
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Excel

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) is a leading insurance company that was founded in 1902. The company provides health, life, and retirement insurance products to individuals and families all across the United States. As a leader in these information-intensive markets, Physicians Mutual set out to solve a familiar challenge: enabling business users to address their own business intelligence (BI), reporting, and information-distribution needs without having to depend heavily on IT for custom data-access and analysis activities.

The Challenge

Physicians Mutual Insurance Company (PMIC) was facing a challenge with its multiple systems used to administer its policies. The company had to go through tedious processes to extract data, store it in databases, and create custom reports for policy-owner and claims administration, financial auditing, underwriting, and other business functions. The company wanted to enable business users to address their own business intelligence (BI), reporting, and information-distribution needs without having to depend heavily on IT for custom data-access and analysis activities.

The Solution

To solve this challenge, Physicians Mutual deployed WebFOCUS InfoAssist, a flexible guided ad hoc reporting solution from Information Builders. This solution enables users to gather, analyze, and publish information on their own – with little or no training. While the IT department handles data quality and centrally manages critical data assets, employees throughout the company use InfoAssist to easily access, review, and analyze information. The company's Enterprise Technology Group (ETG) creates InfoAssist reporting objects to speed up end-user reporting processes and ensure that employees always access sanctioned information. The company also developed WebFOCUS dashboards with data visualization icons such as sparklines and bullet graphs for managers and executives.

Operational Impact

PMIC now has a growing base of self-sufficient business users in accounting, claims, policy management, owner services, billing, and other areas, minimizing dependence on IT and making the entire organization more productive.
The accounting team is able to easily generate everything from simple queries to complex reports, publishing and sharing reports with other people in Excel or PDF formats.
Employees in the Claim Services and Policyowner Services areas are also using InfoAssist to create productivity reports. Meanwhile, the Billing department is using it to analyze late notices and billing reminders. Actuaries are also gradually supplementing their work in Microsoft Access and Excel with InfoAssist reports.