Budgeting and Corporate Performance Management with IBM COGNOS for Insurance Carrier

Project summary Implementation of COGNOS-based CPM platform; Automation of planning and budgeting; metrics and score carding and different business levels; Modernization f existing DWH.
Customer Large Heath Insurance provider after a period of growth organic and through acquisitions needed to improve the decision making and operational efficiency.
Project geography USA
Project objective The client’s existing management information management was characterized by heavy use of Excel, a stand-alone budgeting and reporting solution, no structured workflow for routing budgets for review and approval, and a proliferation of reports and offline worksheets without any standardization across business entities.

Primary business objectives of the corporate performance management (CPM) program were:

  • Provide timely information to support better decision making
  • Establish a platform to support management of score carding and analytical reporting
  • Provide access to detail-level transactional data as well as integration with other internal and external data sources to increase the value of the information
  • Standardize reporting and planning structures where possible
  • Utilize driver-based planning and budgeting models
  • Increase transparency
Project highlights
  • Modernized corporate DHW with modern DWH design practices, such as conforming dimensions and facts and Data-marts enterprise bus
  • Implemented COGNOS Planning Solution on top of consolidate CPM Data-mart with a reliable foundation of core data, reporting, and planning capabilities,
  • Established a transparent and integrated driver-based budgeting and estimation system
  • Standardized and automated budget workflow and approval process
  • Designed and built a standard set of core financial reports that can be used across business entities
  • Designed and deployed self-reporting capability that is based on centralized data source
Project description Team and Process
  • Defined clear vision and established senior management sponsorship, project road map in the organization
  • Included both business and technology people in working project team, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities
  • Managed user expectations and ensure user engagement throughout project cycle
  • Prepare organization to adapt to business process changes and standardization
  • Create data source ownership and understand business rules and cleansing logic for all data sources
  • Planned for holistic design and staged rollout with iterative approach for design and development
  • Thoroughly tested releases and established scalable technology infrastructure

Design and Technology

  • Corporate DHW was enhanced with data from other source systems
  • The COGNOS Planning now acts as a source for budget and estimate data to the DWH and Data-mart. Existing ERP system receives planning data from DWH

COGNOS 8 Business Intelligence uses DWH and Data-marts and implements Web-based standardized reports, business entities, and provides ad hoc and self-reporting capabilities to business users.