Anaplan - Mentat Technology

Barbican Insurance Group

Insurance companies often face the challenge of having to deal with lots of calculations of varying complexity across different departments. Many insurers have found that Anaplan helps them manage the challenges that comes with large, complex and business critical calculations, coupled with their need to provide internal reporting of results. Barbican Insurance Group has implemented Anaplan’s cloud-based business planning and execution platform bringing more control to their business planning and less labour-intensive reporting.

Collecting data and user inputs from many different departments can make reporting a slow and time-consuming activity. Using spreadsheets brings problems around tracking changes and having multiple people working from the same spreadsheet. If the calculations are found to be wrong, finding the error responsible can be difficult.

A number of insurance companies have found that automated simplified reporting structures accelerate the process so things can be done that wouldn’t have been possible with spreadsheets.

“The insurance sector is one of the world’s most heavily regulated industries and if a business can find a way to not only streamline the reporting process, but also make it more accurate, this represents a crucial competitive advantage. The Anaplan platform can offer such an advantage – our analysis function could be central to the growth of organizations in this sector.”

Mentat Technology supported Barbican with their initial Anaplan implementation. Barbican’s objective was to use Anaplan to help with their reserving process, allowing them to calculate how much money should be held to meet all future claims. Anaplan now handles all of their reserving calculations and Barbican have expanded their use of Anaplan to include Financial Planning and Analysis.

“With Anaplan we can now aggregate up from the most granular level. This gives us greater analytical capabilities which facilitate more informed decision-making” said Alastair Lauder, Syndicate Actuary for Barbican Insurance.

“Our actuarial modelling process is now much quicker in terms of processing time, and as a result we are able to spend more time on the analysis itself. Reporting both externally and internally is now far easier.”

Following their successful implementation, members of the project team at Barbican have continued to recommend Mentat Technology as an implementation partner to other insurers who have wanted to start using Anaplan.

Budget Time

I have never done a budget myself, so I am not really qualified to write this article. However, I do know of the pain of having to get everyone to get their figures in. I do not know the pain of reworking all that data to fit into the form you need, as people will not give it you in the form that you need it.

I do not know the pain of trying to answer those seemingly simple, innocent questions that mean that you that to wrestle the data into another shape to get the answer. Inevitably, the answers to the first questions lead to a second set of seemingly simple, innocent questions, that lead to another round of data wrestling, and this can go on for quite a while.

Continue reading“Budget Time”

Delivering Anaplan From Home

When working with a cloud-based platform like Anaplan, we are used to building models and collaborating remotely, but how easy is it to run an entire project without any real face-to-face contact? This year most employees have had little choice but to work from home. In my latest project for a large insurance company we put the idea of an ‘entirely remote’ project implementation – where everything is done remotely, including scoping and project planning – to the test.

Five UX features you may not have discovered

The release last year of the Anaplan UX was one of the largest and most eagerly anticipated product updates that Anaplan has seen.

In the months since the first public UX release, we have seen hundreds of updates to the UX with extra features being delivered on an almost daily basis. Some of these new features will be quite clear to anyone building or using an App, but other features are a little more hidden. Here are five UX features which you may, or may not, have already discovered.