Financial services
Marketform installs new business intelligence system
28 February 2008
Specialist liability insurer Marketform has implemented a new business intelligence system from supplier CODA Group. Marketform is a leading specialist liability insurer for professionals across a range of industries and markets. It works with brokers, businesses and organisations in more than 35 countries, and has recently become a part of the American Financial Group.
CODA’s Intelligence application provides a sophisticated analytic framework with a ready-made datamart (a database, optimised for in-depth, high-volume, offline analysis of financial and other key business data). It will give Marketform access to the right information, in the right format for business users, faster and more efficiently than before.
“With this tool, our finance users can extract and amalgamate key financial data from any number of source systems, and then load it into the system’s integral datamart,” said Richard Sage, Marketform’s finance project manager. “Using the latest Microsoft technology including Reporting Services in SQL Server 2005, we expect the CODA software to deliver some excellent benefits through improved performance, reporting times and user satisfaction.”
As well as integrating Intelligence with its current Financials implementation, which it upgraded as part of the project, Marketform will also feed data into the system from its specialist insurance system provided by CODA partner Room Solutions. The company has also implemented CODA’s Analytic Explorer software which is a straightforward but powerful analysis tool that enables users to extract key data directly from Financials or from their offline datamart (Intelligence), build multidimensional analysis ‘cubes’ and then view and work with the results using Microsoft ProClarity and familiar Microsoft Excel tools.
“Many companies think they ought to implement a business intelligence programme and technology to support it, but don’t necessarily understand what they are trying to achieve by doing so,” continued Sage. “We have a real requirement to analyse business data to improve productivity and we expect to see efficiency savings as a result.”
Roger Doubtfire, Marketform’s finance director, is very pleased with the implementation. “We are already seeing benefits from this project as it has given us the ability to quickly turnaround information to support the recent Due Diligence process,” he said.
CODA’s datamart is specifically designed for gathering data and delivering it for analysis (as opposed to the Financials database which is optimised for transactional data input and processing). Information can be analysed and displayed in a number of ways, from creating specific key performance indicators, to complex data ‘cubes’.
Intelligence uses robust, proven Microsoft technologies, including a new data-loading engine that has been redesigned and built using the Integration Services tools from Microsoft SQL Server 2005.