Texas Windstorm Insurance: creating a blue sky finance process
Simplifying The Process
TWIA struggled with a complex and fragile planning process driven by spreadsheets that made budgeting and reporting an ordeal. Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, TWIA can now fulfill its reporting obligations with a click while simplifying the budgeting process for both the finance department and business users.
Overcoming the storm
TWIA plays a critical role to ensure that people can live, work, and play on the Texas coast. While TWIA and its sister organization Texas FAIR Plan Association (TFPA) answer to the Texas Legislature, it receives no government funding.
As a result, it has all the financial complexity of a private insurance company that generates revenue through its policyholders, coupled with the extra compliance and reporting responsibilities of a government agency.
“We have to prepare two types of reports,” said Clarisse Lilley, Senior Manager, Financial Planning & Analysis at TWIA. “One report is for internal use by management and the board, while the other is in a separate format for state regulatory reporting.”
“Both reports are created at different times and on different cadences, and require information to be presented in different ways. Downloading data and then slicing and dicing it to put it in the right place was a huge headache,” she said.
TWIA also regularly struggled with fragile spreadsheets that were error-prone, easy to break, and time-consuming to use.
“It was a massive undertaking because we had about 120 sheets across different units, 12 departments, and then split between TWIA and TFPA,” Lilley said. “Each department would use different templates and track different things. I would have to start preparing for the budget season three months ahead just to be ready.”
Modernizing the finance department with Workday Adaptive Planning
TWIA decided to modernize its finance department by making the switch to a cloud budgeting and forecasting platform.
“In order to meet our needs, I really pushed our CFO to look at Workday Adaptive Planning. I had a background implementing it at my previous position, and had seen how far it had come in that time,” Lilley said.
After analyzing its short list of five different platforms, TWIA selected Workday Adaptive Planning thanks to its ability to closely mimic the organization’s current process and model while introducing the ability to leverage automation and cloud functionality.
“We were able to recreate everything exactly the same, so it wasn’t a big adjustment for our users to fill in their budgets,” Lilley said. “It keeps it simple for them, while making our jobs easier.”
Leveraging industry expertise with Kainos
In order to achieve a rapid time-to-value, TWIA sought out a partner that had specific experience implementing Workday Adaptive Planning for insurance companies. By choosing Kainos, TWIA was able to leverage their experience building models for other insurers running the full gamut of operational metrics, including written/earned premiums, revenue per policyholder, and cost per claim. Because Kainos already understood the unique business challenges of the industry, TWIA knew it would be able to hit the ground running with Workday Adaptive Planning faster without having to waste time educating its consultant about its business.
“Kainos knows the product extremely well,” Lilley said. “They also know the intricacies of our business model and how we would want to set up our budgets. Kainos put us in touch with another insurance company in Oregon that they worked with, and their recommendation couldn’t be higher.”
Navigating the deployment journey
When it came time to deploy Workday Adaptive Planning, the finance team at TWIA was impressed by Kainos’ forward-thinking approach.
“They were very detailed with project planning, and had a blueprint that helped us gather everything we needed before we fully started the project,” Lilley said.
“Thanks to their industry expertise, they were able to ask the right questions about how we want to calculate things like payroll, employee incentives, premiums, losses, operating expenses, and allocations.”
Kainos set up Workday Adaptive Planning to mimic TWIA’s previous model while offering suggestions for tweaks to improve finance department efficiency. Kainos also worked to integrate Workday Adaptive Planning with TWIA’s ERP to automatically import data, eliminating manual data entry.
In addition, Kainos worked with the TWIA finance team to create an initial model for one department, and then provided the training and knowledge required for the finance team to build its own models for other departments, ensuring TWIA would be self-reliant after the deployment.
By taking the time to understand TWIA’s needs and aspirations, Kainos was able to leverage its consultative approach to drive a genuine transformation of the finance department.
Empowering TWIA business users to engage with finance
Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, TWIA is now able to spend less time during the budgeting season collecting data and more time gleaning insights from it.
“Before, I spent so much time just inputting data. Now I don't need to do that because the departments can enter their budgets on their own,” Lilley said.
Business users also appreciate how much easier Workday Adaptive Planning makes their work. Users are encouraged to work with the data as they see fit, instead of being warned not to delete rows in fear of breaking a fragile spreadsheet.
“They are amazed because they can just log in and get what they need. They don’t need to ask me what version of the spreadsheet I’m using. Now we only have one source of truth.”
Reporting is now vastly simplified thanks to Workday Adaptive Planning’s OfficeConnect feature, which allows the finance team to update and create new reports with a click.
What's Next?
While TWIA has been focused on modernizing its current processes, the finance team is also looking forward to using Workday Adaptive Planning to unlock new capabilities.
“One thing we are looking at is connecting the system to our data warehouse to enable reporting on non-financial metrics such as policies,” Lilley said. “We are also looking into augmenting our reporting by giving business users more access to real-time dashboards.”
“And after this budget season, we plan on doing 10-year projections leveraging scenario planning, which is something that would have been difficult before with the spreadsheet.”