Business intelligence is key for Chubb

International insurance giant the Chubb Group is set to go live with the third stage of its three-year project to improve the corporate view of its business activity across its European units.

Chubb's European group identified a need to consolidate its reporting procedures as information was being split across a number of systems, making it difficult to pull together detailed reports.

It launched its European Management Information Repository (EMIR) system in April 2001 to improve performance reporting, analysis and claims management and the relationship between Chubb and its brokers.

The company was looking to build on its ability to produce reports on a country or product basis, said Peter Thomas, Chubb vice president of the EMIR system.

"To get an overall picture we had to bring different reporting systems together, so there was still some fragmentation. And we couldn't do analysis by industry or size of policy," said Thomas.

As its US-based parent company already had an existing relationship with business intelligence (BI) software vendor Cognos, Thomas opted to use Cognos BI software and reporting tools to form the core component of the centralised EMIR system.

"The [reporting] application means we can develop one cube, so people can write different reports that are relevant to them. There is a certain amount of self-service involved. Most of our time is spent restructuring the data," he said.

This three-dimensional approach to building online analytic processing data warehousing models meant Thomas and his team did not have to develop a different model for each type of query report.

And the web-based distribution of the Cognos PowerPlay tool enables each user to customise the structure of a report's data, as well as the look and feel of it.

Chubb's profitability group was the first to move over to the new system at the start of 2003. The second group, managing its broker relationships, started using EMIR in September 2003.

"The third reporting group, due to go live in June, is aimed at helping our claims department and is a little more internally focused," said Thomas.

"Otherwise we have been focused on developing training events and materials, including e-learning."