Shin Kong Life Builds Business Management Information System

Snapshot

Organization Established in 1963, Shin Kong Life Insurance is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Shin Kong Group. The insurance provider has 466 offices throughout Taiwan, with 2000 revenues exceeding $5.1 billion.

The Challenge To meet the changing needs and requirements of a widespread user base for reporting and analytical solutions.

The Strategy Creation of a Business Management Information System that empowers employees to access and analyze current business information using Web-based reporting tools.

The Results Managers can now handle their own reporting and business intelligence needs, with little or no help from the IT department. More than 200 reports for almost 20,000 employees are quickly accessible via the internet, reducing costs by 50 percent.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS, FOCUS for S/390

Shin Kong Life Insurance Company (SKL) remains at the top of its field for two simple reasons: relentless innovation and a commitment to superior customer service. In the highly competitive insurance industry, data analytics play an important role in the decisions SKL managers make – often affecting the entire enterprise business strategy. To ensure managers always have complete, up-to-date information, SKL relies on business intelligence and reporting technology from Information Builders.

Established in 1963, SKL is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Shin Kong Group. SKL has more than 22,500 employees at 466 offices throughout Taiwan, with 2000 revenues exceeding $5.1 billion.

Fueled by rapid growth and expansion, SKL encountered difficulties delivering reports to its branch offices. Most departments were plagued by a lack of integration among computer platforms, operating systems, and databases, making it difficult to consolidate information. The company needed an effective business management information system (BMIS) to simplify analytics and decision support.

"Information collection, delivery, and integration are critical functions within the insurance industry, but our information systems were holding us back," admits Gu-Ben Wang, IBM mainframe manager at SKL. "It was hard to generate reports using COBOL, and especially difficult to fulfill requests for ad hoc reports from our various offices."

Due to its heterogeneous computing environment, fulfilling report requests was a tedious process. Insurance professionals at each of SKL's 466 branches submitted daily transactions to the mainframe computer at headquarters for consolidation. Then, Wang and others on the Information Technology (IT) staff wrote COBOL programs to create detailed reports for branch managers and analysts. User requirements varied and many different reports were needed for each branch. In addition, the reports were only available in hardcopy format, requiring managers to peruse large reports in an attempt to find relevant information. "Many of our managers wanted the information to be available on their workstations so they could perform their own analytics," Wang adds.

To address these reporting issues, SKL formed a special team comprised of six individuals from the IT division. This group devised a plan to deliver a business management information system that would address the business intelligence and reporting needs of the company. "We evaluated business intelligence tools from several technology vendors," recalls Wang. "After an extensive assessment, we chose Information Builders' FOCUS for our BMIS system. The FOCUS product was easy to learn, quick to code, and provided a rapid payback."

FOCUS quickly replaced COBOL as the main report development tool, encouraging SKL to move centralized reporting functions from the IBM OS/390 mainframe to departmental workstations. The strategy was an instant success. "BMIS has become an important information source that is used daily by all our managers," notes Tien-Fu Huang, SKL's manager of IT. "Managers are now able to use their workstations to access mainframe data directly. They have a readily accessible tool for decision-making and business intelligence."

Instant Access to Current Information

In order to open BMIS to a larger user community, SKL devised an e-business strategy that relies on the Web to deliver reports to its widespread organization. Web-based reporting software from Information Builders made the job easier. "We chose WebFOCUS because it had a short learning curve and users became productive quickly," Huang recalls. "In addition, WebFOCUS was highly compatible with FOCUS."

The e-business reporting strategy was straightforward. Authorized employees were given access to instant and up-to-date information through their browsers. Additionally, business offices were set up in each county, along with 18 service centers within each province that are configured with high-speed connections to the corporate intranet. Creating Web-based reports was a breeze, since the existing FOCUS report procedures easily mapped to WebFOCUS.

"I've had only 12 hours of training with WebFOCUS and I'm already productive," says one employee within the IT department. "It's an advanced business intelligence environment, yet users don't have to contend with the complexity found in other tools. It takes less than two days for a junior programmer to become proficient with the WebFOCUS environment."

SKL also automated the data transfer and load procedures to ensure managers have current business information each day. Each night, current information from all offices is transferred to a Microsoft SQL Server database on a midrange server, which can be directly accessed by WebFOCUS. The following morning, all the employees and managers have the latest business information available through their intranet browsers. "A normal text report can be displayed via our BMIS system within three seconds and within a browser or in a graphic format in seven seconds," says Hui-Tan Lui, manager of New Systems Introduction. "We are very satisfied with this performance."

Presenting information in a graphical format allows users to create their own reports and extract more intelligence from the database. "WebFOCUS gives us a very powerful way to generate reports," Huang adds. "It used to take an entire day to get one report using COBOL. Using WebFOCUS, it takes only three to four hours. This reduces our costs by up to 50 percent and allows us to more effectively use IT resources."

SKL's IT department has developed more than 200 reports for almost 20,000 employees, all of which are accessible via the intranet. SKL uses WebFOCUS not only for exception reporting but also for financial, accounting, and expense reports, all of which have been incorporated into an intuitive menu system within BMIS.

Buoyed by the success of these business intelligence initiatives, SKL is planning to roll out WebFOCUS to every department. The long-term objective is to empower each user to retrieve, analyze, and deploy business information with little or no assistance from the IT staff. "Our goal is to enable employees in each department to see information in the format best suited for their needs," Huang concludes. "We are pleased to enable each department to access business information through WebFOCUS. We have seen a rapid return on our investment in Information Builders."