AJ Grant Group

"We’ve been using QlikView and NPrinting for around 12 months now, and we’ve been able to see a return in regards to our staff not wasting time looking for data. It’s been more efficient for them to access the data that they require."

Brad Honeyman, General Manager

AJ Grant Group Australia is a leading Australian building services provider that specialises in building insurance claims and flood and fire restorations. The company manages over 25,000 insurance claims annually, with each claim valued between $500 and $1 million.

When an insurance company receives a building insurance claim from a customer, it forwards the claim to AJ Grant for processing. AJ Grant contacts the customer directly, organises onsite visits to assess the damage, arranges quotes from its network of over 1500 contractors to carry out repairs or renovations, manages the completion of work and then closes the job with the customer. To ensure that each project is delivered within the time frame required by the insurance company, AJ Grant carefully monitors cycle times (the total time from receiving a building claim to project completion), project cost and build quality.

Meaningful insights locked up in existing data

Prior to implementing a QlikView solution in 2014, AJ Grant relied on a custom-built CRM system to manage insurance jobs. The system was designed to manage data on a job-by-job basis, so it was difficult to extract general data such as the number of jobs closed that week or whether key performance indicators were being met. Performance and business logic issues hindered AJ Grant’s attempts to produce complex reports, while employees wasted time searching for information that was difficult to locate and often out of date.

With no easy way to interpret or act upon valuable insights locked up in existing data, AJ Grant was missing out on opportunities to improve its efficiency and productivity.

AJ Grant required an IT solution that would provide employees with fast access to dynamic data. General manager Brad Honeyman said the solution needed to update data in real-time, automatically deliver insights to key stakeholders and present information visually. He met with Professional Advantage’s business intelligence team and chose to implement a customised QlikView solution. Brad said he appreciated Professional Advantage’s business intelligence methodology and the fact that the company had invested time in understanding AJ Grant’s business processes.

“We did quite a bit of investigation into other systems that were around, and some of the restrictions both in the system we were using and other systems were that… we weren’t able to achieve the data representation that we were looking for. We found that QlikView was able to give us that data in a format that we could utilise and distribute to staff,” he said.

Improved transparency and efficiency

Professional Advantage implemented a customised QlikView solution tailored to AJ Grant’s specific business needs.

Using QlikView, AJ Grant can now monitor the progress of all jobs lodged in its CRM system. QlikView tracks analytics such as the number of jobs received and closed each week, job cycle times and whether AJ Grant is meeting key performance indicators set by insurance companies. The data is presented dynamically in a format that is easy to access and interpret, while reporting module in QlikView allows AJ Grant to automatically push reports from QlikView into other formats.

Brad said AJ Grant has seen significant improvements in employee productivity, transparency and access to data since the solution was implemented.

“We’ve been using QlikView for around 12 months now, and we’ve been able to see a return in regards to our staff not wasting time looking for data. It’s been more efficient for them to access the data that they require. We have a lot more transparency with our data, and we’re better able to monitor staff with KPIs and cycle times and this has also enabled us to provide better reporting to our clients as well,” he said.

Faster processing of urgent claims

When severe storms hit Sydney and Newcastle in early 2015, AJ Grant received six months’ worth of claims in just a few weeks. One of AJ Grant’s customers, an insurance company, set the business a challenge to complete 90 per cent of approximately 6,500 claims in 90 days. Professional Advantage’s QlikView solution has played a key role in meeting this challenge, which will finish at the end of August.

“One of our largest clients has tasked us with meeting a 90-day challenge to get through those claims. This obviously presents a lot of challenges for AJ Grant. We have had to onboard a lot of new staff and bring on a lot of new resources,” Brad said.

Using QlikView, AJ Grant set up a 90-day challenge dashboard to monitor new staff, manage job progress and meet key performance indicators. The dashboard, which was set up in less than a day, shows information such as completed tasks and work that needs to be completed within a certain period to meet targets. QlikView has allowed AJ Grant to get on with meeting the requirements of the 90-day challenge, rather than spending time manually generating reports.

The future

AJ Grant plans to expand its use of QlikView throughout the business as its team develops a greater understanding of the products’ capabilities.

“Our initial project has evolved as the business has grown, and also in response to requirements from our clients. We have achieved what we were originally looking for, and we’re continuing to evolve the system,” Brad said.

“We are looking to further enhance the reporting we provide to our staff with daily KPI reporting, where data is delivered straight to their inbox without them needing to go looking for it. We’re also looking to enhance different data models within the business so we can incorporate other data into our dashboards and reports.”

The first phase of the implementation focused on using QlikView to collate, model and present data, while later phases will centre around automated report generation and delivery via NPrinting.