Chubb Uses Intuitive Business Intelligence Tools to Gather Data From Disparate Systems and Migrate It to Decision-Support Systems

In any business intelligence initiative, it is imperative that BI tools leverage insurers' existing environments -- no matter how multifarious or far-flung. In order for Chubb Insurance Company of Europe (CICE; London), a subsidiary of Chubb Corp., to empower its business users, it needed a BI solution that could handle a phased approach to incorporation of the parent company's data from U.S., Asian, Latin American and European systems, as well as data from its own business and claims units.

In any business intelligence initiative, it is imperative that BI tools leverage insurers' existing environments -- no matter how multifarious or far-flung. In order for Chubb Insurance Company of Europe (CICE; London), a subsidiary of Chubb Corp., to empower its business users, it needed a BI solution that could handle a phased approach to incorporation of the parent company's data from U.S., Asian, Latin American and European systems, as well as data from its own business and claims units.

The answer came in the form of Chubb's European Management Information Repository (EMIR). EMIR is the environment in which Chubb pulls together data from disparate systems and migrates that data to decision-support systems for ultimate presentation in CICE dashboards used to assess catastrophe and climate change, distribution channel strategies, insurance cycles, and new and changing risks. The "reporting families" using EMIR include portfolio management, dashboard, budget tracking, producer management and profitability. "There is significantly greater detail and flexibility in executing comparisons, ratios and calculations reflecting important metrics for each unit," according to Peter Thomas, VP of European Enterprise IT, CICE.

"For us, it was important that EMIR leverage our Informatica [Redwood City, Calif.] enterprise data integration environment," says Thomas. That environment, which comprises reporting systems representing the company's critical business units and claims organization, is built on top of an Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.) operational data store (ODS).

Informatica PowerCenter is the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool Chubb uses to move data from original sources to its ODS. Once in the ODS, raw source data is transformed into relational and then multidimensional reporting databases. For the latter task, the company also makes use of PL/SQL, Oracle's native language for Oracle databases.

Once the data goes through its transformation, it's important that users are able to access data through their preferred "prism," Thomas says. "Underwriters want the information that shows them how to make a profit, and claims may want to look at whether or not it is meeting service-level expectations," he explains.