Shelter Insurance Deploys Tidemark to Cut Annual Budget Cycle in Half

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 25, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- One of North America's leading regional insurance companies cut its annual budget cycle in half after implementing financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software from Tidemark, maker of modern cloud-first business planning and enterprise analytics apps.

Shelter Insurance Companies, a $1.5 billion provider of insurance to consumers and businesses implemented Tidemark this year in the midst of its preparation of the 2015 budget.  After using Tidemark software, Shelter sees the potential of reducing the time it takes to prepare its annual budget by half in the coming year due to the replacement of its spreadsheet-bound budgeting and forecasting system with Tidemark software.

"Prior to Tidemark, we set up Excel templates with lots of manual calculations to gather our budget information from about 150 different departments and cost centers," said Tina Workman, vice president of accounting and assistant treasurer at Shelter Insurance Companies. "It took a lot of manual effort. Someone had to enter that into our legacy GL program by hand.  This meant we always had to start the budgeting process earlier than we wanted to."

Many efficiencies came almost immediately this year after Shelter Insurance implemented Tidemark and Workday Financials to eliminate time-consuming manual processes and to make planning more collaborative among 250 stakeholders across the organization.

For Shelter Insurance managers, participating in FP&A – once a time-consuming slog – is an entirely new and efficient experience. "They used to have to consolidate cost centers on a spreadsheet," recalled Workman. "Tidemark does it in a click of a button. It's transformational to them."

Defined as a "super regional" insurer by insurance rating agencies, Shelter Insurance employs 1,800 people and another 1,300 agents who sell auto, property, business and life insurance policies in 14 states in the Midwest. The company also maintains a brisk international reinsurance operation that underwrites coverage for other insurers aiming to protect themselves against catastrophic loss. In total, Shelter Insurance has $5.5 billion of assets under management.

Shelter anticipates that managing FP&A across all those businesses will be dramatically easier as the company works towards fully utilizing Tidemark's flexible metrics capabilities.  Shelter is discovering how Tidemark allows them to view important metrics, such as monthly policy counts, in ways they never could before. In the past, finance couldn't break policy counts down by auto, home, renters or other lines of business, instead reporting only top-line numbers for its property and casualty policies. In the near future analysts will get a real-time view of policy counts by line of business, and then drill down to view counts and policy retention levels by agent. These insights will help sales and marketing managers understand where to implement campaigns to increase sales of various lines of products.

A More Agile Organization

Al Finley, manager of planning and research at Shelter Insurance, said the company can operate with greater agility because Tidemark is available to users anytime, even on mobile devices, and requires less handholding from IT than its previous system did.  "With Tidemark, we have all our budget information and metrics stored in one place but accessible anywhere," said Finley. "And we'll always have the latest version of the software without us having to schedule an upgrade with IT.  We've been pleasantly surprised at how flexible Tidemark is, and impressed with the scalability of its computational cloud."

For instance, inputting annual salary schedules once required custom programming, so any adjustments made midstream meant a new round of coding and coordination. Now, Finley said, "We can adjust those tables on the fly and instantly see what impact they'll have on total salary expense."

As it relies on Tidemark for deeper analysis, Shelter Insurance plans to eventually correlate external factors, such as weather and population growth, to the type and frequency of claims by state, county or city.

Meanwhile, Tidemark's integration with Workday, along with its consumer-grade user experience, helped bring more managers into the FP&A process right from the start. "Everything we do in Workday flows into Tidemark, and Tidemark is even easier to use than Workday," said Workman. "Just four days in, we had 158 users on the system. People think it's cool."

"Every day our customers share that Tidemark is helping them answer questions they never could before, gaining insights that their inflexible legacy systems kept locked away," said Christian Gheorghe, founder and CEO of Tidemark. "We're delighted to welcome Shelter Insurance Companies to the growing list of market-leading innovators who are embracing the power of Tidemark's born-in-the-cloud, built-for-mobile apps to help them build a collaborative planning culture in order to eliminate silos and thrive in an increasingly real-time world."

About Tidemark
Tidemark is a new breed of enterprise performance management (EPM) software – modern, cloud-native and mobile-first. Innovative brands like Netflix, Chiquita, BlackBerry, Brown University, and HubSpot rely on the Tidemark platform and advanced analytics cloud to sharpen decision-making, reduce risk and improve business performance. Using Tidemark's unique, intuitive apps, decision-makers across the organization gain access to valuable data, deep analytics capabilities, real-time collaboration, and actionable visualizations from any device. Tidemark has offices throughout North America and Europe and is funded by Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. To learn more about Tidemark, please visit www.tidemark.com or follow us on Twitter @TidemarkEPM. 

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