PHILADELPHIA INSURANCE COS. STREAMLINE FINANCIAL REPORTING

Philadelphia Insurance Companies (Bala Cynwyd, PA, $1.3 billion in assets) will begin to add automation to its previously manual process of budgeting and financial planning by deploying business performance management (BPM) software from Satori Group, Inc. (Philadelphia).

Philadelphia Insurance will deploy Satori's proCube BPM software across its North American operations. ProCube will allow Philadelphia Insurance's users to continue to use Microsoft (Redmond, WA) Excel spreadsheets, while automatically capturing live data stored in financial systems.

"The ability to instantaneously access and analyze data from multiple sources is critical to supporting the decision process," says Craig P. Keller, executive vice president, secretary, treasurer and CFO at Philadelphia Insurance Companies. "We saw proCube's value to our planning, reporting and analysis activities; proCube is "easy to understand, and viewing our financial and operational data in the demonstration convinced us that Satori is the software developer of choice to support our growth and industry-specific needs."

According to David Libesman, CEO, co-chairman, and chief revenue officer of the Satori Group, Philadelphia Insurance Companies had a "very manual budget process on the accounting side that was based on spreadsheets." Satori formulated a pilot that consolidated financial data from six different financial sources. "It took us four days to get the pilot ready and we presented it to them," Libesman says.

On reason Philadelphia Insurance Companies selected Satori's proCube over other BPM applications available on the market was that proCube did not force Philadelphia Insurance Companies' business users to learn a new front end, meaning users can still leverage familiar Excel spreadsheets, according to Libesman.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio