Hexaware Q2 net rises 48% on higher revenues

Software service provider hexaware technologies has reported a 48 per cent increase in net profit at Rs 89.03 crore for the second-quarter ended june 2012 against the same period last year.

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Hexaware bets on UK, new verticals to lead mid-tier IT growth

Infosys, TCS and Wipro may be getting cautious in their outlook, but not hexaware technologies

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After nine quarters of positive growth, the mid-tier leader is confident of a 20% year-on-year (yoy) growth in dollar revenues for fiscal 2013.

 

 

 

Not investing in Insurance Analytics? You may be spending more for sure!

Insurers today may be drowning in data but remain thirsty for actionable knowledge. Perhaps this drives 57% Insurance carrier globally to indicate that Insurance Business Analytics is one of the four most probable IT solutions in which they are looking to Invest. This is in line with Gartner’s view on top 10 technologies to impact Life Insurance

Many Insurers have business analytics strategies in place but many more are yet to seriously adopt it for various reasons. It is interesting to examine some reasons carriers often give for not investing in Insurance Business Analytics -

• We already have some reportingsolutions in place
• We don’t need to use Analytics
• We are thinking of this initiative
• We think it is too expensive to implement anInsurance Business Analytics
• Isn’t Analytics for bigger organizations?
• How does it help?

It’s evident that the benefit of Insurance Business Analytics is not clearly understood, though it is widely acknowledged that the historical data can be analyzed to gain incisive insights. Few even argue that Insurance Business Analytics answers some simple questions like;

• Which distribution channel is best performing?
• Where is an opportunity to upsell?
• Is there a pattern in claim that is received?

…and they already analyze this and generate reports periodically to answer these questions. While arguing they often overlook the fact that Insurance Business Analytics is not just reporting. It holds the key to optimized performance, informed decisions, actionable insights and trusted information. By bringing together all relevant information in an organization, companies can answer fundamental questions such as;

• What has happened?
• What is going right and what has going wrong?
• Why is it happening?
• Predict – what is likely to happen?

Not that the insurance companies are not mining their own data but the way they do it, is inefficient and time consuming. Problem lies in the fact that most of their data is generated by disparate systems and there is a possibility of the data present in different formats. Combining the data derived from disparate system to gain actionable knowledge through use of spread sheets cannot deliver information showing it from different dimensions. It is also possible that after doing an intensive exercise one may not derive information which allows view to minutest level and present them in most innovative manner.

In absence of a comprehensive BI solution, the operations folks may be spending considerable time on non-core and repetitive activities without considering the fact that there can be smarter way to do more with less effort thus increasing productivity and lowering associated cost implications. Some of the disadvantages of analyzing data without analytics in place;

• Your team may not have access to unified business data on a single click. Often teams spend a lot of their time trying to collate data from various systems or departments to create single version of the truth. As companies grow, the struggle deepens, resulting in a further dip in efficiency.
• Various departments would have various data/ report requirement and valuable time is lost to ensure work is done within the expected time-frame.A lot of time is spent chasing similar accounts across departments, building individual bridges, attending to duplicate leads or services requests across channels, etc. This drives up transaction costs and inversely impacts team productivity.
• Since manual reporting doesn’t allow you to slice and dice the data it is rather impossible to view data form different dimensions. Thus you may be losing critical opportunity to increase productivity and arrest revenue leaks. Isn’t it way to costly the value of which may not be readily accessed?

After analyzing how crippling it is without Insurance Business Analytics, let us look at some of its advantages -

• Analyzing region wise, channel wise, line of business wise, business growth and profitability and viewing snapshot reports on portfolio premium or policy count exposures during a period helps you take timely and proactive decisions.
• Measuring the turnaround time (TAT) for various operational process lets you know the operations efficiencies and points out process bottlenecks which if corrected in time would increase productivity.
• Evaluating the performance of various channels in terms of target v/s achieved premium in real time helps improve field force productivity. It is easy to target the most profitable agents and promote him to achieve higher targets.
• It is possible to detect pattern in claims outgo. One can do a time based, cost based and region based analysis to understand fraudulent patterns and take proactive actions to arrest revenue leaks.
• With the advantage of having a full 360° view of customers, carrier can easily find opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell to customers based on their buying patterns and profiles.Identify new customers by running marketing campaigns that ensure promotions do not target customers who have already purchased that particular product. Employ selective targeting of potential customers based on the buying patterns of existing customers.

Thus cost of implementing Insurance Business Analytics is far less than what you would already be investing in data analytics and to add to it losing the competitive edge can be far too pricey.

We at Hexaware have mature Insurance practice that brings industry knowledge to best of breed Business Analytics solutions and help insurance carriers to adopt Insurance Analytics in a systematic manner.

Write back your feedback or comments for further discussion.

Read More about  Insurance Analytics

Accelerate Insurance Testing with our BPT accelerators

Everyone knows that automated testing can save insurance companies time and money. The testing processes become less error-prone and test execution windows become smaller, larger data volumes can be used to more test scenarios in a shorter period of time. Automated testing is great for regression testing as it helps you to quickly confirm that functionality developed for new releases has not in some way adversely affected your existing policy or claims administration functionality.

Not everyone knows that insurance companies might be losing money by implementing test automation in an inefficient manner.

You may be repeatedly creating automated test scripts for controls reused on multiple screens. To give a very simplistic example, if you have got an automated script to test address capture controls for a broker screen, you certainly don’t want to build it all over again when testing address controls on any other partner related screen.

You may be wasting effort building scripts for testing common business processes. Automated test scripts for key standard functions on vanilla installation of the product might be procured at a low price. You could easily reuse these with only minimal changes which reflect the difference between the way you do business and the way your competition does and thereby save a great deal of money on test script development effort.

We suggest that you look out for a good Business Process testing accelerator when buying a test automation product. Such products can save you time and effort that you would otherwise expend on developing automated test scripts which are already cheaply available. Hexaware supplies outstanding 3^rd generation test accelerators built on HP software to its insurance customers. These include accelerators for SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel etc. You can read more about these at http://www.hexaware.com/business-process-testing-accelerators.htm

Hexaware has recently come up with a BPT test accelerator based on the above principles for the eBaoTech General Policy Administration System. The value proposition of this BPT accelerator is  as below

• Non-technical “Building-Block” approach to test design – non-technical Subject Matter Experts (SME) can easily assemble test scenarios by assembling out of box business components built for auto industry functionality on eBaoTech GS using “drag-and-drop”
• Automatic creation and upload of reusable components – Hexaware’s User Interface Scanner automatically discovers metadata specific to your eBaoTech GS instance and creates additional components automatically. This is very useful to keep track of new components that get created as the application evolves and moves away from the vanilla configuration and it can save months in test development time.
• Easy Integration Testing – Inbound and Outbound interfaces to and from eBaoTech GS with any application (Legacy or web-based) can be automated using the BPT accelerator.
• Repeatable and reusable – Pre-built components are easily uploaded and fully integrated with a centralized test management tool in minutes.
• Elimination of up-front development time – It enables your testing teams to begin test design process earlier in the Software Development Life Cycle.
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Reusable library of scripts cuts Test Maintenance costs and reduces the time taken to assemble new functional test scenarios.

To summarize BPT accelerators from Hexaware for the eBaoTech system and ERPs like PeeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP are a worthwhile investment. These products emphasize reuse of prebuilt business processes and automate discovery of changes to components thereby saving you dollars in the test development process.

Strategy for developing Mobile applications for Insurance

Smart phones such as iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Phones and now Android phones are revolutionizing the way we use the internet.  According to Gartner Research, mobile phones are set  to overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013(http://www.gartner.com/resId=1268513). It is no wonder therefore, that many of our insurance clients are looking out for applications to exploit the mobile phone revolution.

Their key question usually is where to begin?  What to develop and how?  Do we develop apps for Claims reporting to record Auto Insurance FNOLs? Do we provide our agents with premium calculators? Shall we provide apps for clients to view policy status, pay premium online etc?

To get you started, we give below a few key factors to consider when evolving your insurance mobile services strategy.

Wide acceptance and ease of use by potential users: You need to prioritize apps that would help the largest number of users or customers. Within these, prefer those which are easy to use and which help these users get a business benefit easily. If your analysis indicates that out of the potential apps that can be built, an office/agent location finding app would benefit most of your agents, customers and other business partners, build that first.  If you feel that there is a greater demand for an app to record FNOLs from accident sites then move it up your list of priorities.

Real time integration with back-end systems: If you were to develop an insurance renewal payment app, you would realize that users are more likely to use it if they get real time responses to their transactions. Immediate confirmations would certainly reduce their anxiety about the success of their transaction and increase the acceptability of your application. Real time integration may appear to be a daunting requirement for carriers with complex systems. But it can be achieved by use of web services to expose the required data/functionality real-time to your mobile application.

Mobile platforms:  Your app should function on the platform which is most likely to be available to your target audience. If your users have iPhones or iPads, you need to develop apps on the iOS platform. Do bear in mind that this is a single vendor platform. All applications developed for this platform must be cleared by Apple before being it is made available on the AppStore which is the sole distribution channel for iPhone touch applications. On the other hand if your users have a number of devices supplied by different vendors, consider developing the app on a multivendor platform like Symbian, Android, or Windows Mobile. The Android OS is an attractive choice because it is fast gaining popularity and because its development tools are free.

Though every carrier may have its own way of looking at things, the baseline strategy for all of them would of course always be to “do what the business demands”.  Do let us have your thoughts on the subject.

Read More about  Mobile Insurance Applications