30 March 2007

Equity Insurance is one of the leading companies in the UK retail insurance market, specialising in the provision of personal lines products and services to both corporate businesses and consumers. The company required a tool that could generate reports at the touch of a button and at any given time within the month, and that would also assist with future business planning.

Equity chose Applix to implement its TM1 solution because of its ability to carry out complex business modelling on all areas of the business, identify key performance indicators (KPI's), project cash flow and plan for budgetary purposes. These planning capabilities means the company can achieve complete transparency, improve agility and create uniform processes across the organisation.

Based on its OLAP (online analytical processing) engine, TM1 provides Equity with a tool that enables users to analyse different aspects of the company's multidimensional data, which is stored in a central database.

Because it is stored in a central place, the data can be updated and refreshed giving every user the most recent information, regardless of where they are accessing it from.

"TM1 allows us to analyse key statistics. For example, within our broking business we can look at which types of policies are being taken out, the number of policies we are selling, where they are being sold and the penetration of products in certain markets. With all this data at the touch of a button, we can better plan for our customer needs," says Richard Smith, finance systems manager at Equity Insurance

Streamlining financial reporting across the organisation was the first success Equity experienced with TM1. Aided by the fact that TM1 has a user interface based on Excel, powered by a powerful analytical engine, Equity staff easily adapted to the TM1 programme and the learning process was very rapid.

"The detailed modelling that TM1 facilitates exceeds anything we have seen before. Information can be presented in a more detailed yet easy-to- read format. The reports produced are more consistent, allowing quicker production times of the data," says Smith.

Time spent compiling individual reports from disparate spreadsheets was also reduced, which in turn improved individual productivity. Equity can now update data into the TM1 system from Sun Accounts 5 every five minutes, making it near real-time. Previously, this process took 24 hours. The procedure has continually evolved to needing the reports monthly, to weekly, to daily and now even hourly!

"The benefit of near real-time analysis is invaluable to a company like ours, especially at month end. What used to take days, now takes mere hours. We finally have a single view of the true financial and some operational performance of our business," explains Smith.

Equity quickly realised the additional potential of TM1 for its analytical capabilities. The new TM1 system enables business analysts and auditors to view data from a strategic or transactional perspective, giving them a three dimensional view of business performance.

The year-end processes and subsequent month end reporting cycles have been shortened almost by half as a direct result of the use of the TM1 system. Following the initial purchase of a TM1 planning server, Equity has since bought an additional analytics server from Applix. "TM1 has been used by the group auditors to assist with their interrogation of financial information. In addition, business analysts are also able to run projections which enable them to continue to grow the business," says Smith.