Closing the distance using SAS® Enterprise BI

Managers, boards of directors, executives - everyone needs up-to-date information for decision making. And today that often means they need it in real-time. James Beaver and Tobin Scroggins from Farm Bureau Bank give their users the option of emailed reports for this real-time or near real-time information, or the users can access the dashboard to create personalized reports.

Orginally, Beaver and Scroggins wanted to use the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to provide financial information to the state representatives of Farm Bureau Insurance. But as they were building out the dashboard and reporting capabilities, they realized that it had broader uses for them.

Their seemed to be a separation between internal customers (e.g. documentation, lending, personal banking) and external customers (Farm Bureau Insurance agents and state representations). A step to reduce that sense of distance was to provide the dashboard and daily financial reports to all stakeholders.

Various departments are supported by the work that Beaver and Scroggins do, including the board of directors, lenders, documentation, underwriting and personal banking. The reports help these customers compare and contrast department against department, county against county, state against state, etc. “It gives them a better idea of what’s going on,” says Scroggins.

Beaver and Scroggins wrote “Using SAS® Enterprise BI for Integrated Bank Reporting” to show other SAS users how to create and present reports using SAS® Enterprise BI Server and the SAS® Information Delivery Portal.

In their paper, they cover the following reports:

Financial balance sheet and income statement

Variance reports with actual, budgeted and difference – by department and line item. The reports let the user to drill down to the general ledger entry.

Daily and monthly new account volume

New account volume by geographic area and type

The dashboard and reports are for anyone in the organization who is using BI applications – for instance, administrators and analysts may be very comfortable manipulating a cube, whereas business users and executives may only want an “easily digestible” piece that shows up every morning in an email.

“We are in a place now where things are siloed, but we’re moving toward using SAS as the reporting system for the entire organization,” says Scroggins. “So, that will be our one version of the truth.”

According to Scroggins, he and Beaver don’t deliver reports to Farm Bureau Insurance customers, but the reports may help the internal stakeholders serve the customers better. There are no metrics to verify that the reports and dashboards have improved the bank’s operation or performance - no money saved, no extra money earned – but perhaps this soft ROI is just as important.

Read Scroggins and Beaver’s paper, “Using SAS Enterprise BI for Integrated Bank Reporting.” You can find all of the 2013 SAS Global Forum papers here.

Closing the distance using SAS® Enterprise BI was published on SAS Users.