Moving Forward with the On Demand Real-time Enterprise

64 Moving Forward with the On Demand Real-time Enterprise

Figure 2-21 Retail layered architecture

The IBM solution will allow you to physically support a design that is tailored to

the needs of your business, giving access in real-time to point-of-sale (POS) and

inventory data, while at the same time providing summarized views to

re-occurring business questions such as:

򐂰 What are the sales in this region?

򐂰 How do my stores compare in performance?

򐂰 Who are my top customers?

This design, when mapped to your enterprise, will help determine the right

number and type of building blocks needed to build the data warehouse. The

building blocks will be determined by such things as the number of users,

complexity of workloads, and how active your warehouse is in terms of data

delivery.

IBM has the components that can enable you to implement an on demand

real-time enterprise in your retail establishment.

2.5.2 Insurance

The Financial Services industry faces a number of key challenges and business

issues. This section will examine those challenges to provide a fundamental

Operational

Tactical

Strategic

Floor 1

Floor 5

Floor 4

Floor 3

Floor 2

Floor 0

Decision Making

Sales Transactions, Customer

Contacts, Orders, Invoices

Sales

, Product, Customer, Suppliers,

Promotions, Stores, Inventory History, orders

Performance and rolled up Data

Customer Mgmt,

Merchandising Mgmt, Store

Operations, Product Mgmt

BPM,

Corporate

Finance

POS, Store Operations, Channels, Inventory, Customer Management,

Order Systems, Suppliers, HR

Chapter 2. The real-time enterprise 65

understanding of the issues that we help solve with Business Intelligence

solutions. In general, this industry has faced a period of industry consolidation

due to loosening regulation of bank and insurance companies. While loosening

regulation has allowed these companies to expand into other service offerings,

other legal and regulatory changes have tightened accounting practices and

information privacy restrictions.

For example, there are more-stringent underwriting practices. Underwriting is a

core element of the insurance process — and a particularly important concern for

risk management efforts — but is typically handled in a largely manual, and

therefore less efficient, manner. Insurers will be forced to refine their underwriting

practices to increase efficiency and speed, and provide greater accuracy and

consistency. Underwriting has gained increased industry attention and is

becoming a key part of strategies to reduce operational costs and drive

competitive differentiation through enhanced data and segmentation.

Increased use of BI and implementation of a real-time enterprise is required to

get the information needed at the time it is needed. This support, and the sharing

of enterprise data, must span the insurance value chain, as depicted in

Figure 2-22. Implementing this capability is part of becoming a real-time

enterprise.

Figure 2-22 Insurance value chain and BI

Policy Submission, Underwriting and Issuance today can be a complex, time

consuming and expensive process. Large Insurers may write policies through

captive or independent agents who have their own agency management system.

Portfolio

Management

Profitability

Loyalty &

Retention

Cross

Selling

Multi-Channel

Management

Fraud

Detection

Lead

Generation

Channel

Management

Policy

Holder

Acquisition

Under -

writing

Marketing

Claims

Mgmt

Trend

Analysis

Risk

Management

Product

Operations

Policy

Admin

Regulatory

Reporting

Pricing

Sell Risk to

Re-Insurer