Brotherhood Mutual Selects Information Builders Business Intelligence to Drive Planning and Operational Efficiency

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - June 30, 2008) - Information Builders, the independent leader in pervasive business intelligence (BI) systems, today announced that Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company has selected Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform as its enterprise reporting standard to support a web of knowledge that makes the company more cohesive by giving business users a smooth and intuitive way to access and share information.

Based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Brotherhood Mutual has a 90-year history of serving the insurance needs of churches and related ministries across the U.S. When the company needed a better way for users to access timely information, it turned to BI technology, leveraging WebFOCUS for direct-access reporting.

The Information Builders BI platform is connecting workers throughout Brotherhood Mutual with current business information, via parameterized reports and automated workflow systems. WebFOCUS allows users in claims, customer service, and other departments to access timely operational data from various systems and platforms without support from the IT department.

"We wanted a general-purpose BI environment so all users could go to one place to find the information they needed," said Daryl Pannabecker, vice president of IT at Brotherhood Mutual Insurance. "We selected WebFOCUS based on the flexibility of its development environment, strong support for business users, and highly responsive sales and support organization. WebFOCUS provides many new ways of accessing, analyzing, and displaying our data," added Pannabecker. "It's an essential tool for management, planning, and operational efficiency."

Brotherhood Mutual leveraged WebFOCUS to overhaul an Excel-based time-tracking system used by its customer service personnel. Previously, each rep spent four to five hours per month creating activity reports, and the IT department spent a solid week rolling up the spreadsheets at the end of each year. Using the BI platform and Lotus Notes, the team created a time-tracking system that allows customer service reps to log their time via an online form. The new system streamlines all time-tracking activities and saves many hours for both reps and administrators, delivering information that previously was not available until the end of each period.

Using a WebFOCUS dashboard, the insurance company also developed a BI environment to track pending claims and generate workload statistics. The dashboard allows dozens of users to access important BI information on demand through a browser interface. More than 25 drillable graphs boost awareness of every aspect of claims activity. Users can break down information by location, time, or individual adjuster, drilling down into each variable when they want to do further analysis. Managers have a color-coded dashboard interface that enables them to continually balance the workload for adjusters.

WebFOCUS will also be used to help provide additional insight to about 25 managers and department heads. As part of a new ad hoc reporting architecture, WebFOCUS will pull information into data marts, sorting information by year, month, and week to speed up the reporting process. Users will be able to perform "what if" analyses right within their browsers and save useful reports to a library. The company also intends to use Information Builders iWay Software DataMigrator to manage its entire data access, transformation, and BI process in a consistent fashion.

"Brotherhood Mutual is demonstrating the value of making business information accessible to every person or application that needs it," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. "Its real-time BI environment brings current data to the front lines, enabling a more effective and responsive organization."

About Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company

Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company provides property, liability, workers' compensation, commercial auto, and foreign travel insurance coverage exclusively to churches and related ministries. National Underwriter magazine ranks Brotherhood Mutual as one of the nation's Top 50 most profitable property casualty insurers, based on its average combined ratio over the past 12 years. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce recently named Brotherhood Mutual one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana. Brotherhood Mutual was founded in 1917. It has more than 450 independent agents serving customers in 31 states and the District of Columbia. The company employs 250 people in its corporate offices in Fort Wayne.

About Information Builders

As a leading independent business intelligence (BI) company for the past 30 years, Information Builders has provided innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and numerous U.S. federal government agencies. The company's flagship WebFOCUS product is the world's most widely used BI platform. Superior architecture and intuitive nature enables WebFOCUS to address the needs of everyone in the extended global enterprise -- executive, analytical, operational, and beyond. It provides the agility to adapt to changing business conditions with the security, scalability, and flexibility to support dozens to millions of users.

Unique to the company is the integration expertise it brings to the BI market. Information Builders iWay Software suite solves complex integration problems with pre-built components that require minimal custom programming. The award-winning combination of WebFOCUS and iWay give Information Builders customers the ability to embrace the company motto: "Everyone Makes Decisions."

Information Builders is committed to customer service excellence with a Professional Services division that specializes in building custom applications using WebFOCUS and iWay Software. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. Visit informationbuilders.com.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Kathleen Moran Information Builders (917) 339-6313 Sheila Bohan Emerge PR (617) 729-3185