Swann Insurance Selects Birst to Slash Time Spent on Reporting

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Jan 24, 2012) - Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced that Swann Insurance will use Birst to reduce time spent generating monthly sales reports by 120 hours per month. The provider of personal insurance anticipates that, with faster, easier access to these vital reports, it will be able to further optimize the value of its distributor relationships. With Birst, companies can enjoy a comprehensive business analytics suite in one single, powerful solution that includes all the components required for advanced business intelligence (BI) and makes the often cumbersome task of deployment quick, easy, and affordable.

Through a network of distributors, Swann Insurance provides to more than 750,000 Australian customers policies that vary in length and are composed of personal insurance products covering motorcycles, cars, bicycles, loan repayments, bill obligations, and life insurance. To evaluate distributor performance and policy profitability, the organization relies on detailed reports of close to half a million records a month to track information related to policy sales, such as policy length, policy components, and corresponding claims and sales commissions. By deploying Birst, Swann Insurance will gain dramatically faster access to this information and be able to more quickly identify, adjust, and replicate business practices that optimize distributor relationships and improve overall business results.

"One of our internal analysts has been spending three weeks a month running these reports, importing information from our core insurance system into Excel and then performing additional analysis," said Vaughan Coots, System & Application Manager, Swann Insurance. "With Birst, we can automate this process, which will allow us to reallocate 120 hours a month toward other aspects of our business, and significantly accelerate key decisions and their impact."

In its search for a flexible, affordable solution to replace the company's time-consuming reporting process, Swann Insurance evaluated a number of options, including its existing deployments of Salesforce.com and Business Objects. The organization quickly determined that Salesforce.com would be unable to process the large amount of information involved at the level of detail required, and that the cost of expanding and maintaining its on-premise Business Objects deployment would amount to at least three times the cost of implementing Birst. In addition to delivering an affordable BI solution that can be quickly deployed in the Cloud or on premise, Birst will provide Swann Insurance with easy-to-use, advanced functionality that enables users to display pixel-perfect reports in a format of their choice, and drill-down for additional detail as needed.

"Birst is breaking new ground by providing an affordable BI solution that couples flexible deployment options with enterprise-class functionality," said Brad Peters, CEO of Birst. "With this combination, we're eliminating the barriers that have historically prevented organizations from quickly and easily gaining business insight that accelerates the decision-making process and boosts the bottom line."

About Swann Insurance
Swann Insurance is Australia's largest niche insurer and a leading provider of personal insurance products. With more than 50 years of experience, Swann Insurance provides protection to over 750,000 Australians for their motor vehicles, motorcycles, loan obligations, specialised extended warranty, bicycles and various debt/fee obligations.

Swann Insurance has offices located in all Australian capital cities and retails a comprehensive range of insurance products through its chosen distribution channels of Motor Vehicle Dealers, Motorcycle Dealers, Finance Brokers, Bicycle Retailers and Educational Institutions. With a substantial network of over 1,600 authorised distributors, Swann Insurance has the expertise and resources to support the industry with market-leading services.

About Birst
Birst™ is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of a business' analytics and the agility to answer questions that span departments, data sources, and deployments -- across public or private Clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to answer their most pressing business questions -- and then all the ones they didn't know to ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information, visit www.birst.com.