Birla Sun Life Insurance has deployed IBM’s Cognos analytics software solution for planning and forecasting its internal business operations.
Further, this would help Birla Sun Life integrate operational and financial planning functions, which would give its internal teams flexibility in business functions. This helps in determining resource requirements and forecasting of future business performance.
This solution helped in streamlining their spreadsheet-based planning and budgeting process for data coming for more than 600 branches and multiple insurance-related products. As part of this, IBM’s Cognos would provide financial planning solutions in areas such as channel-wise projections of revenue, expenses and headcount, actuarial model, capex planning, expense analysis, scenario trend analysis, and data comparisons.
This helped Birla Sun Life Insurance identify the different sales trends across the region and plan better for the coming months. The Cognos solution also facilitated the BSLI team in doing what if and scenario analysis which earlier was not possible due to the time taken in managing spreadsheets for data collection.
The project was completed within 100 days, within the target time and allocated budget, according to IBM officials.
Mr Mayank Bathwal, CFO & Head - Institutional Sales said: “We can plan better, monitor performance at a granular level, manage profitability and capital efficiently. The solution is easy to use and our finance team can learn easily with minimal change management or skills upgrade. Also the finance team is able to support the solution for their business users with minimal support from IT team.”
Mr Prashant Tewari, Country Manager, Business Analytics, IBM Software Group India/South Asia said: “In the face of the fast-changing business environment and regulatory scrutiny, this application compresses the time for finance to close the books and eliminates the risks associated with more manual processes, spreadsheets and legacy systems.”