Driving Better Business Decisions Through Data Access in Microsoft Azure

We helped an insurance company make their business-critical data more consumable in Microsoft Azure to drive business decisions.

Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual (PLM) is a mutual insurance company dedicated to serving the wood products and building materials industries. Founded more than 125 years ago, it is the oldest and largest wood industry insurer, providing protection for some 5,000 wood-related businesses nationwide.

The company’s stated mission is “to be recognized by stakeholders as America’s premier property and casualty insurance company serving the lumber and building materials industries by establishing long-term relationships built on stability in the marketplace, superior service, industry-specific risk management, quality products, and the utmost professionalism as we consistently strive for profitable growth.”

However, PLM, like much of the insurance industry, had a data challenge. Summed up by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s line “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” PLM had a lot of data, yet it was not in a consumable form. In other words, it could not drive business decisions.

That’s why PLM embarked on a program to redesign its business intelligence and analytics capability. The company acquired new claims and policy management systems, and while they greatly improved the customer experience, the new systems fell short of meeting the organization’s analytics needs.

Disparate tables in a legacy COBOL system few people understood continued to drive reporting. Production staff spent their Saturday mornings preparing premium and loss details in Excel spreadsheets for their Monday morning meetings. The company didn’t realize the full potential of its data. PLM needed a system that would give them a sweeping view of how their business was functioning and the ability to dive into the factors most influential to their results.

Kris Moniz

National Data and Analytics Practice Lead

Sean Sweeney

New England Insurance Lead

Want to learn how you can improve business through data access?

Months for Deployment

Source Systems Connected

Data Dashboards Built

Enter Centric: A Custom Solution Deployed in Months, Not Years

After years of expertise in the insurance industry, Centric created its Insurance Analytics Platform (IAP). Our IAP is unique because of its series of accelerators. Accelerators are foundational components that are common to most insurance applications. Upon this structure, we build customized components and deploy solutions in record time and at a much lower cost.

In a few short weeks, as part of a proof-of-concept phase, we rolled out two of our IAP Claims dashboards in PLM’s Azure environment and set up nightly data refreshing. As a result, PLM experienced firsthand the power of data visualization. Plus, nightly data refreshing was a long-sought feature.

Impressed by what they’d seen, PLM asked Centric to implement our full IAP solution – moving nearly 10 years of detailed data into a data lake, data warehouse and dashboards – for PLM’s two Policy systems, their Claims system, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, Reinsurance system, and General Ledger. We deployed an entire custom solution in nine months while working remotely with PLM.

While accomplishing these technical feats, we also addressed an aspect often forgotten in the process: the people. To facilitate IAP adoption, PLM supplemented the project with a dedicated expert from Centric who focused on change management and training. All PLM departments were involved from the start and throughout the project.

We educated stakeholders and gathered their feedback throughout the development cycle. By production time, being part of the journey, everyone was enthusiastic and ready to hit the ground running.

The Results: Data Visibility Drives Better Business Decisions

PLM made crucial discoveries about its business as a result of our engagement. With gross and net profitability finally available at the individual policy level, insights quickly surfaced around the actual profitability of specific products in certain markets and geographies.

With Centric’s IAP dashboard visualizations, PLM can see the data in a way that answers vital business questions, such as:

How quickly are we turning around claims?
How well are we doing at estimating and reserving the cost a claim incurs?
Are we underwriting good business, or do we need to make changes to guidance?
Are we taking care of customers efficiently and in a financially prudent way?
How are employees doing with the claims process?
Do we need to provide additional training?

In summary, our solutions granted PLM increased efficiency in managing claims and reports and better functional reporting that offered not only a solid foundation to modernize the remainder of PLM’s data structure but also the opportunity to rationalize other obsolete systems and applications.

PLM now makes decisions based on data they previously either could not access at all or could not access with a frequency that allowed for more timely business decisions. Today, the power of this data reaches into all departments within the organization, improving decisions with less effort across the company.

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