Insurance companies are required to hold several years’ worth of data at the most detailed level – the individual transactions. However, the best way to analyse your data is by summarising it, which if done skilfully will help avoid many of the problems large volumes of data can present.

The warehousing of data is in itself a way of summarising the data. Sometimes data beyond a certain age can be left behind in the organisation’s operational systems or archived in some way.

An effective way of dealing with large amounts of data using Business Intelligence is to analyse the data in a dimensional hierarchy, using say, a ‘powercube’, then drill through to detail on the data that interests you. For example, by looking at the cube you might find a particular type of policy you want to examine in more detail for a particular quarter. Once this is highlighted you can then drill through to a report that shows this particular policy and quarter in much more detail.

The insurance industry is rich in metrics such as gross premium, earned premium, net premium, gross net premium, and so on. This means it is ideally suited to multidimensional analysis using tools such as Powercubes, dashboards and metric scorecards.