Case Study

HanseMerkur – Case Study

Board delivers fast improvements in Planning and Forecasting activities

The Company

The HanseMerkur Insurance Group is a traditional nationwide insurer with more than 1,951 employees and full-time agents based in Hamburg, Germany. With premium income of €1,580.7 million and investments of €5,307.7 million Euros (2014), HanseMerkur has a high level of financial solidity, which their customers and employees benefit from and further facilitates the goal of permanent independence for the HanseMerkur Group.

 

The Business Need

The introduction of the new controlling solution is intended to increase the quality and efficiency of the planning, forecasting and reporting processes at HanseMerkur. Before introducing the new solution, a variety of Excel sheets were created and assembled manually for Controlling. In order to ensure user acceptance and improve the quality of the reports, the platform was required to be simple and free of programming. Flexibility and user safety were also key selection criteria whilst ensuring the administration and further development of the solution could be carried out by the specialist in-house department.

 

The Solution
HanseMerkur selected Aios Planner, an application based on Board, developed by Board’s partner AIOS.
 
The requirements were: 
  • Improvement in the efficiency of the planning, reporting and forecasting process
  • Programming-free and simple operation
  • Further development by the specialist department

 

The application was set up as a client-server solution with the source data coming from SAP, PAISY, MS Excel and Access. In the planning and forecasting process, data is collected via predefined masks. 
 
Different distribution keys, scenario calculations, and top-down/bottom-up planning are supported in the planning and forecasting process.  In addition, individual key figures, traffic lights, and cockpit graphics are provided across the application.
The special features of the implementation were to develop a complex distribution algorithm for planning, forecasting, and reporting.  This automatically distributes the cost elements via individually defined keys to different insurance providers. When designing, building and adapting the data model, existing, planned and new distribution approaches had to be integrated.
 
 

“Launching the new controlling solution greatly improved the quality of work in the corporate planning division.”. 

Stefan GerlachHead of Corporate Planning

 

The Benefits
The following benefits were realized within the HanseMerkur Insurance Group:
  • The preparation of the planning and forecasting data was accelerated from two weeks to one
  • The effort to create and combine approximately 120 different Excel lists of cost center managers in planning and forecast has been removed
  • The effort to create customized cost center reports in FoxPro has been eliminated through automated and user-specific reporting in Board
  • Users can easily create different scenarios for their area of responsibility and create their own reports and views
  • The drill functionality and new graphic elements in Board allow for a more detailed evaluation, depth and breadth in the data analysis
  • All financial data of recent years can be analyzed in time series and compared and contrasted