Portals are a great way of bringing together information from a wide variety of sources into a single place, thus saving time otherwise spent looking for information.
Traditionally organisations have built intranets which are used to share information within the organisation, but increasingly they are looking to extend the sharing of information beyond the organisation to their business partners, in what are now referred to as extranets.
Another development in the role of portals has been the integration of business intelligence to enhance the static content already available. This offers centralised access, aids communication and enables useage anywhere in the world, whatever your location.
Benefits include:
- secure data access
- fast seamless data access
- easy navigation
- centralised
- customised views.
Project examples
Financial advisory network
We integrated a BI capability into an existing portal solution for a network of financial advisory firms. The portal is accessed by internal sales management as well as over 2,500 financial advisers across 780 franchises. The BI solution covers sales KPIs, written and issued business, pipeline, selling capacity, recruitment, productivity and league tables. The reports were delivered using PDF files with the ability to enter a series of parameters, as well as interactive analytical reports. The technology used was SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (SSRS) for delivering to the PDF format, and ProClarity Analytics for performing the interactive analytical reporting.
Award winning global reinsurance broker
We implemented the BI component of a portal solution which provides a range of analytical services to support their clients with the placement and renewal of their reinsurance coverage. The solution enables clients to perform their own interactive analyses against their exposure, loss, and accumulation data and as such gain greater insight and value from the analytic output. The solution integrates ad-hoc analytical capabilities such as drilling, filtering, slice-and-dice across tabular, chart and mapping representations of the data. The tabular and chart based views were implemented using ProClarity Analytics, and Microsoft SharePoint technologies were used for the portal.
Financial advisory organisation
We built a commission payment system which integrated a set of data extract files from Fidelity Funds Network with the Sirius Swift system and then executed a commission allocation process. The solution included an administration console to configure the commission allocation process and to launch a suite of reports covering financial accruals, accrual statements, payments due and renewals.
Swiss reinsurer
We implemented a complete BI solution covering underwriting, claims, actuarial and finance which is presented in a Microsoft SharePoint based portal. The portal contains a suite of reports across all of the areas including both fixed format reports delivered using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2005 and interactive analytical reports delivered using ProClarity Analytics.
Large insurance intermediary
We implemented BI solutions for both the broking and underwriting divisions, which integrated data from over 70 separate companies within the group and presented a single set of corporate KPIs through a Microsoft SharePoint based portal. This is an internal portal but required strict security controls to limit access to information across the different companies. The solution presents information in both fixed format reports delivered using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2005 and interactive analytical reports delivered using ProClarity Analytics.