NEW YORK – February 16, 2010 – Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence <http://www.informationbuilders.com/business-intelligence.html> (BI <http://www.informationbuilders.com/bi-software.html> ) solutions, today announced that Physicians Mutual, a national health and life insurer based in Omaha, Nebraska, has adopted WebFOCUS InfoAssist <http://www.informationbuilders.com/products/webfocus/webfocus-infoassist.html> to provide reporting, analysis, and information-delivery capabilities to business users. Employees at Physicians Mutual can more easily create their own reports, while the IT department enforces data quality and centrally manages the information. InfoAssist is enabling people throughout the company to more efficiently and effectively create the information they need.
“Our previous BI tools were readily usable only by a relatively small base of experienced people, but WebFOCUS InfoAssist is now allowing people to create complex reports very quickly,” said Rick Olson, senior manager of data administration and business intelligence at Physicians Mutual. “We expect the number of InfoAssist users to grow as more and more people see its capability.”
Physicians Mutual introduced WebFOCUS InfoAssist to several people in the accounting department for ad hoc reporting. With minimal training, these employees were soon using the browser-based reporting environment to create reports. About 20 people now use WebFOCUS InfoAssist on a daily basis to examine GL balances and to investigate and explore statutory detail. According to Greg Hopkins, vice president of corporate accounting at Physicians Mutual, the financial staff can create reports without IT assistance, generating everything from simple queries to complex reports and charts. They can easily publish reports and share them with other people in Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF formats.
“Being able to point WebFOCUS InfoAssist to our pre-defined reporting objects has been a big win for us” said Grant Christensen, vice president of corporate financial reporting at Physicians Mutual. “We can very easily look at accounting information in the general ledger in a variety of ways, such as the amount of premium by journal code, account code, line of business, journal date, type of policy, state, even down to zip code. We now have the ability to create our own reports in a secure and productive end user reporting environment.”
In addition to the accounting department, the claims, and policy owner services areas are using InfoAssist to create productivity reports, and the billing department is planning to use InfoAssist to analyze late notices and billing reminders.
