Program Benchmarking

Advisen Program Benchmarking provides a quick and convenient way to measure your company’s insurance program against the programs in a specified “peer group”. A peer group is a collection of programs that share certain characteristics; for example, year 2003 programs for computer software companies with annual revenues between 100 and 500 million dollars.

Your Company is Preloaded

Advisen will preload the data for your company. (See details below.) Your company’s name appears as the first field on the form.

Fig. 1, ”Company”: Advisen preloads your company.

Select Industries for Your Peer Group

Advisen will default the peer group industry selection to the industry for your company. However, you may change the industry selection if you wish. Use the Industries dropdown menu to select up to 3 industries. Or, you may select “All” to benchmark against all companies, regardless of industry.

Fig. 2, Industries List: Use this list to benchmark against companies in specific industries.

Ø Did You Know?… To make multiple selections from a list box, hold down the CTRL key while you click on each selection.

Select Revenues

As with industries, Advisen will default the peer group revenue selection to the range that includes your company. If you prefer to benchmark against companies in a different revenue range, you may select up to 3 ranges, or you may type in your own range. Note: When Advisen looks for companies matching your revenue ranges, selection will be based on the most recent annual company revenue available in the system.

Fig. 3, Revenues: The list box lets you pick up to 3 of Advisen’s predefined ranges. If you want to define your own range, type the range start and end into the type-in boxes below the list. (You can select from the list or type your own.)

Ø Did You Know?… When typing numbers into Advisen, you may type “k” for thousands, “m” for millions and “b” for billions. Examples: 100k (100 thousand), 500m (500 million), 10b (10 billion).

Select Time Periods

Benchmarking always relates to a time period. For example, policies will be for specific start and end dates, company revenues will be for a specific year, etc. In defining your peer group, you need to identify a time period to use. You may specify a time period in any one of these three ways:

· Select up to 3 years, OR

· Select a single trailing period up to 12 months ago, OR

· Select up to 3 trailing periods between 12-24 months ago

Fig. 4, Time Periods: Note that there are three lists of options to choose from. You may choose from any one list. If you choose from one list, then another, your previous selections will be turned off.

Record Counts: How Many Records Match Your Peer Group?

When benchmarking, we’re often interested in the size of our peer group. Since we often tend to attach more significance to comparisons made against a larger sample, you might choose to relax some of your selection criteria, in the interest of enlarging your peer group.

The “# of Matching Records” column, on the right side of the page, helps you see how your selections impact the size of your peer group. You can see your selections and the number of records matching them.

On the bottom right of the page is a field labeled “# Matching ALL Company & Program Criteria”. This tells you the number of records that meet every criteria.

Ø Counts are not updated automatically. When you make a change to your selection criteria, you must hit the “Update Count” button to see revised counts.

Fig. 5, Number of Matching Records: The left column shows your selection, and its corresponding count appears to the right. In this example, the user has selection two industries and two revenue ranges.

Select Coverage and LOBs

By default, your peer group will include programs for all coverages and all Lines of Business (LOBs). Note on Fig. 6 that, when the coverage choice is “All”, the LOBs menu also has only a single choice – All.

If you prefer to limit the peer group to include only programs for a single coverage, select the desired coverage from the Coverage dropdown menu.

Once you select a coverage, the LOBs menu will list the LOBs related to the selected coverage. By default, all LOBs for the coverage will be included in the peer group. If you want to restrict the peer group to only specified LOBs, select them on the LOBs menu. You may select up to 3.

Fig. 6, All Coverages: Here the Coverage selection is the default, “All”. With this setting, programs for all coverages, and all LOBs, will be included in the Peer Group.

Fig. 7, Coverage Selected: With “Management Liability” selected as the coverage, the LOBs list shows only the relevant LOBs for the coverage.

Fig. 8, Program and Analytics Fields. Use these fields to specify the program you want to benchmark against the peer group.

Specifying the Program to Benchmark

At this point, you’ve described the peer group you want to benchmark against. Now, it’s time to specify the program you want to benchmark.

Fig. 8, above, show the fields that let you specify your program. The first field, “Policy Year Ending”, provides a menu of years; the years that appear on the menu depend on the years for which you’ve entered policy data into the survey. Once you select a year, the next set of fields – Premium, Limit and Retention – will prefill with the values corresponding to the year you selected. If you prefer to benchmark different numbers, you can type in different values to any of the fields.

The Revenue field, which appears after the others, will prefill with your company’s most recent reported annual revenue from the Advisen database. As with the other fields, you may type in a different value.

Choosing an Analytic

Analytics are the different measurements you may choose to benchmark. The kind of benchmark graph you get depends on the analytic you choose. The analytic options, and the type of graph produced for each, are shown below:

Analytic	Graph Type
Premium	Histogram (bar graph)
Limit	Histogram (bar graph)
Retention	Histogram (bar graph)
Rate Per Million	Quartile Graph
Premium/Revenues	Quartile Graph
Limit/Revenues	Quartile Graph
Retention/Revenues	Quartile Graph

For more information on histograms and quartile graphs, see the Help sections on those topics.

Peer Group Graphing Options

At this point, you’ve selected your peer group, the program you want to benchmark and the analytic you want to graph. All you need to do now is select some options about how your graphs will look. The “Peer Group Graphing” section (shown in Fig. 9) appears near the bottom of the page.

Average Indicator: Quartile graphs include a special marker indicating where the average falls relative to the “normal” range of values in the peer group. In cases where the average appears well outside the normal, some users prefer to exclude it from their graph. If you uncheck the Average Indicator checkbox, the indicator will not appear on your graph.

Single Graph or By Industry: If you selected multiple industries for your peer group, you might want to graph your program against all programs in the combined group; or, you might prefer to graph your program against each industry separately. Use the radio buttons shown in Fig. 9 to indicate whether you want a single graph, or one per industry.

Fig. 9, Graphing Options. Indicate here whether you want Quartile Graphs to include an Average Indicator, and how you want the industries in your peer group represented.

Click “Go” to Benchmark

Once you’ve completed all of the above steps, click the “Go” button. That appears near the bottom right of the page. After several seconds (more or less depending on the complexity and size of your peer group), the page will reload, and your benchmark graph(s) will be displayed at the bottom of the page.