Aon Asia: Mitigating Risk with Qlikview for Clearer Presentation of Summary Financial Information

• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

• Sales & Marketing

• Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

• Data Science Services

Aon Asia’s management needed a clearer picture of the company’s revenue streams, starting with the ability to segment revenue by industry and product. The existing situation made it difficult to gain a true view of the company’s income across different offices in the region or to allocate the correct fees and commissions among their regional directors and country segment heads. Before using QlikView, it was all manual reporting – from regional director to country segment head to country finance. Each step in the chain required someone to manually compile the data and check for errors – a time consuming process involving a lot of following up with different parts of the business. It also lead to the possibility of different versions of data coming from more than one source. The search began for a packaged solution that could automate the process and analyze the financial streams.

In Asia, Aon is the leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, human capital and management consulting. It is part of Aon Corporation, which employs approximately 47,000 professionals in its 500 offices in more than 120 countries. Backed by broad resources, industry knowledge and technical expertise, Aon’s professionals help a wide range of clients develop effective risk management and workforce productivity solutions. Aon Asia’s goal is to become the partner of choice for companies throughout the region. QlikView’s flexible business analysis tools are helping Aon Asia to achieve this by helping to provide consistent information and reporting to improve Aon’s financial performance and provide a better service to clients.

Aon Asia had a challenge to find a good tool that could meet their needs. According to Glen Francis, the regional Project Manager for this initiative, cost and ease of use– the latter not only for the user interface and the former for ongoing support and maintenance of the applications – were extremely important. Aon Asia had only 3 employees supporting the 12 countries in the region with one other employee dedicating half of his time to the project. “We needed to find something other than traditional OLAP tools, which require a lot of internal and external resources to implement, deploy and support.” Glen was introduced to QlikView by a local reseller. They came in to do a presentation, and Tom Gill, regional CIO, and the rest of the team were soon impressed with the product. Aon Asia began a trial period. “We needed to develop a ‘show and tell’ demo for the management team, and the vendor was great in working with us to achieve this,” said Glen. Keith Edmonds, regional manager and their architect for the data warehouse built an application to analyze revenue across a number of dimensions: by region, local office and servicer (account representative); by product line; by industry; and by client type (new or existing client). The team demonstrated this application prototype during their annual regional CFO/CIO conference and later to the Chairman himself. When they showed the revenue detail by client, their then Chairman and CEO for Asia Pacific said, “This is the information I’ve wanted for the past 10 years.” The project gained immediate approval.

• Creating clearer accountability through standard segmentation across the region
• Identifying and analyzing the most important clients to improve revenue
• Gaining instant access to information in multiple dimension

• Tangible cost savings of $221,000