Why Spreadsheets can send the Pillars of Solvency II Crashing Down


Solvency II is now fast approaching and while it may provide added protection to policy holders, its impact on the insurance industry is not all a bed of roses. Expect insurance companies to restructure, increase manpower, and raise spending on actuarial operations and risk management initiatives. Those that cannot, will have to go. But what have spreadsheets got to do with all these?

Well, spreadsheets aren’t really the main casts in this blockbuster of a regulatory exercise but they certainly have a significant supporting role to play. Pillar I of Solvency II, which calls for improved supervision on internal control, risk management, and corporate governance, and Pillar II, which tackles supervisory reporting and public disclosure of financial and other relevant information, both affect systems that have high-reliance on spreadsheets.

A little background about spreadsheets might help.

Who needs an IT solution when you can have spreadsheets?

Everyone in any organisation just love spreadsheets; from the office clerk to the CEO. Because they’re so easy to use (not to mention they’re a staple in office computers), people employ them for processing numbers and as an all-around tool for planning, forecasting, reporting, complex modelling, market data analysis, and so on. They make such tasks faster and easier. Really?

You probably haven’t heard of spreadsheet hell

Unfortunately, spreadsheets do have certain shortcomings. Due to their inherent structure and lack of controls, it is so easy to commit simple errors like an accidental copy paste, an omission of a negative sign, an incorrect data input, or an unintentional deletion. Such shortcomings may seem harmless until your shareholders discover a multi-million discrepancy in your financial report.

And because spreadsheet errors can go undetected for a long time, they are constant targets of fraudsters. In other words, spreadsheets are high risk applications.

Solvency II Impact on Spreadsheet-based Financial and IT Systems

Regulations like Solvency II, are aimed at reducing risks to manageable levels. Basically, Solvency II is a risk-based system wherein a company?s capital requirements will depend on its measured riskiness. If companies want to avoid facing onerous capital requirements, they have to comply.

The three pillars of Solvency II have to be in place. Now, since spreadsheets (also known as User Developed Applications or UDAs) are high-risk applications with weak control features and prone to produce inaccurate reports, companies will have a lot of work to do to establish Pillars II and III.

There are at least 8 articles that impact spreadsheets in the directive. Article 82, for example, which requires firms to ensure a high level of data quality and accuracy, strikes at the very core of spreadsheets? weakness.

A whitepaper by Raymond Panko entitled ?Spreadsheets and Sarbanes-Oxley: Regulations, Risks, and Control Frameworks? mentioned that 94% of audited real world operational spreadsheets that were included in his study were found to have errors and that an average of 5.2% of all cells in the audited spreadsheets had errors.

Furthermore, many articles in the directive call for the enforcement of better documentation. This is one thing that’s very tedious and almost unrealistic to do with spreadsheets because just about anyone uses them. Besides, with different ‘versions? of the same data existing in different workstations throughout the organisation, it would be extremely difficult to keep track of them all.

Because of spreadsheets you now need an IT solution

It is clear that, with the growing number of regulations and the mounting complexity of tasks needed for compliance, spreadsheets no longer belong in this era. What you need is a server-based solution that allows for seamless collaboration, data reliability, data consistency, increased security, automatic consolidation, and all the other features that make regulation compliance more doable.

One important ingredient for achieving Solvency II compliance is sound data risk management. Sad to say, the ubiquitous spreadsheet will only expose your data to more risks.

More Spreadsheet Blogs


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Disadvantages of Spreadsheets – obstacles to compliance in the Healthcare Industry


How Internal Auditors can win the War against Spreadsheet Fraud


Spreadsheet Reporting – No Room in your company in an age of Business Intelligence


Still looking for a Way to Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?


Disadvantages of Spreadsheets


Spreadsheet woes – ill equipped for an Agile Business Environment


Spreadsheet Fraud


Spreadsheet Woes – Limited features for easy adoption of a control framework


Spreadsheet woes – Burden in SOX Compliance and other Regulations


Spreadsheet Risk Issues


Server Application Solutions – Don’t let Spreadsheets hold your Business back


Why Spreadsheets can send the pillars of Solvency II crashing down

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IT Transformation Defined

Businesses depend on IT to effectively manage business processes and to provide products and services to clients. As IT technologies advance, it is crucial that businesses update their hardware to remain competitive. But businesses should do more than simply upgrade their servers and should really strive to effect IT transformation.

What is IT Transformation?

IT transformation is the ongoing process of changing the way that a company uses IT to better align it with current business goals. Through the IT transformation process, businesses try to determine whether they are meeting mission-critical benchmarks through the incorporation of new IT technologies for corporate transformation.

For example, if one of the current business concerns is whether the company can improve customer service, the IT system will need to evolve in such a way that improves customer service in a measurable way.

Successfully Aligning the Technology to Business Goals

In order to successfully align the IT system with business goals, it is important to understand the newly integrated technologies to understand how they can change business processes. If a new feature is intended to make the server more secure, the management should know exactly how the feature will improve the security of the server and whether the new implementation is redundant.

Once the business objectives have been identified, IT transformation is carried out by changing both the software and hardware used by the company. An example would be the growing trend of server migration to the cloud. Cloud computing is the growing trend of making files and data accessible from anywhere. If an organisation believes that it can improve productivity through a server cloud migration, it will need a way to test this.

The IT Transformation Process

Given that IT transformation is directly related to the core business, the IT transformation process must begin by identifying which aspects of the company must be changed. Then, the company must determine?IT services that could potentially be integrated into the business in a way that will help the company achieve benchmarks. After the key decision-makers understand the IT network well enough to effectively implement it, the company must efficiently manage the transformation process. Then, after the IT has been integrated, the company must have a system in place to measure business transformation in a numerical way.

For example, when assessing customer satisfaction, one effective strategy would be to distribute customer satisfaction surveys that ask customers to rate their experiences on a scale of one to ten. The company can then measure the results of the customer satisfaction survey to determine whether the new IT implementations are accomplishing their intended goals.

If the expected benchmarks are not being met, the next step in the IT transformation process is to determine if there is a specific reason for that. Is there a way that the feature can be better integrated to achieve desired business objectives? Are there other features that can help the company better achieve its goals?

Upgrading a network can be an expensive process and it is important to identify early on which options are the most likely to benefit the company’s bottom line.

How Westin Melbourne Hotel Trimmed its Footprint

Becoming sustainable is a three-pronged process. You must save money and push the buttons the government is pressing you to. But there?s a deeper, more urgent issue. If your customers mark you down for not being green enough you are heading for trouble. Let’s see how well this hotel is doing.

The Melbourne flagship of the Westin hotel chain boasts 262 spacious rooms with views of Melbourne Square and surrounding theatres, designer boutiques, galleries and national landmarks. The architects included conference facilities, a wellness centre and sundry bars and restaurants. After climate change arrived to stay, hotel management discovered they had inherited a water and energy-greedy monster. Their solution was to measure what was going through their systems, and then progressively cap the building?s greedy appetite.

The Melbourne Westin Hotel could not have achieved results without these metrics. They began by determining key indicators and measuring them. This provided them with criteria to set achievable, cost effective targets in the following key areas of their business:

  1. Water Management ? Demand-based linen and towel recycling, installation of back-washable water filters, water-saving shower heads, dual-flush toilets.
  2. Waste Management ? Conversion to green products, recycling kitchen oil, moving towards a paperless office, recycling everything possible.
  3. Energy Management ? Energy-efficient light bulbs, standby settings for lights, computers, televisions and air conditioners
  4. Stakeholder Communication ? Staff green-team training, guest education, ongoing employee briefings
  5. Strategic Positioning ? Visible, top-down commitment, optimised carbon offsets from clean, renewable energy sources, clearly stated position in the market

Westin?s Melbourne landmark has made good progress towards becoming the green hotel for others to follow. It has adjusted its environmental policies, increased water and energy awareness and implemented tight waste management.

Consumers are already shopping to make their carbon footsteps lighter. Food stores are on the bandwagon although apparel is lagging. Perhaps it’s time you found out just how your company is shaping up. It’s no longer a matter of ?if carbon taxes?. It’s a matter of ?when it does?.

ecoVaro is a software system-in-the-cloud that lets you enter your water and energy consumption and process it online so you can monitor and manage your usage. In no time at all you could be saving money like Westin Melbourne did. Does that sound like something worth investigating?

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Increase Customer Loyalty with Field Service Management Software

One sure way to turn off customers is to give them a disappointing experience. It cuts across the board- from plumbing jobs, electrical installation and maintenance projects, window cleaning or repair, tenants in the property you’re managing, to package delivery firms. If your customers keep witnessing delays, cancelled appointments, to oversights like double booking which end up messing their individual schedules, they are likely to stop hiring your services and seek out a competitor.?

Field service jobs are particularly prone to such blunders, especially with the traditional manual way of doing things. While smartphones and computers have been infused into the day-to-day running of businesses, it is still common to find companies relying on manual processes to schedule their appointments, track the employees providing the services, monitor the progress of the jobs and ask for status updates, to managing inventory and invoices for completed tasks. This creates a major bottleneck in operations. The Small & Medium Business Trends Report, that took responses from nearly 500 SMB owners and leaders, showed that they spend an average of 23% of each workday manually inputting data. This is time that would have otherwise been spent tending to the customers? needs. It creates a backlog of tasks, forcing the customers to wait for longer to get their issues handled.?

The inefficiencies witnessed in these traditional methods led to the advent of field service business management software. These systems come in to optimise operations and enhance your service delivery. As a business, automating your scheduling, job tracking, routing procedures and handling the invoicing, all through a single platform, greatly reduces your workload. Managing inventory, communicating with your employees out in the field through handy apps on their phone, giving them access to a database of reports and notes on the various jobs they have been tasked with – these all aid in smoothing out the sorting of tasks, and gets rid of the mounds of paperwork that would have been required.?

From Your Customer’s Perspective

When you’re facing a plumbing leak at home, electrical faults that result in power outages in the office building, damaged gas boilers that are hampering operations in the industrial plants- you want them to be addressed. Homeowners, business owners and facility managers in these situations are anxious about getting the issue resolved- yet the firm they are relying on to handle it is caught up in a logistical nightmare, boggled down by paperwork that prevents them from sending their technicians to the location. You really don’t want to hear a series of excuses about why your problem could not be addressed in time. While delays can be a nuisance, cancelled appointments are altogether exasperating. See, the customer is left in a difficult position, since the problem is not resolved, and they have to contend with having to make a subsequent appointment- of which they will not be sure if they can bank on the hired firm to deliver on its mandate. With an FSM, you get to prevent such incidents from occurring.

How Your Customers Benefit From Field Service Job Management Software

Reliable services

Firstly, the customer wants services that they can count on. When an issue arises and an appointment scheduled, they want it to be honoured. With the FSM, you get to accurately schedule the tasks, from the timing involved to assigning it to the appropriate technician, who is skilled in the task. With the automated scheduling and dispatching, the technician downtime that was previously witnessed is reduced- which has the welcome benefit of cutting down your operational costs.?

Speaking of which, the confusion that was previously seen when perusing through documents and simply calling up the first employee whose skill is similar to the job description, is avoided. Here, the field service management platform enables you to determine the most appropriate member of your workforce to handle the task. This makes them more motivated at their job, resulting in higher quality results- whether it’s an installation task, repair and maintenance project, or cleaning service for companies providing them in residential and commercial buildings.?

Get it done right the first time around

The field service scheduling software enables the technician to have all the information pertaining to the job accessible in real-time. This is availed via app– that the technicians will have on their phones. It is through this very app that they will make updates of the tasks being handled, sending in notes, photos and reports to the system. These will, in turn, be monitored at the head office all through the progress of the job, being managed through the interactive FSM dashboard.?

With the customer’s history being accessed by the technician, information that includes the specs and hazards about the particular job being handled, notes from the previous technicians who had been tasked to the building- such as the installation crew and previous repairs that had been done, will enable the personnel on the ground make well-informed decisions throughout the course of the task. Any issues that arise will also be taken note of, equipment and parts ordered through the app as well, ensuring that things proceed seamlessly. That way, the percentage of situations getting fully resolved during the first appointment increases- which translates to fewer cases of complaints being made.?

Instant invoicing

Immediately the job is done, the customer inputs their e-signature through the app, and the technician marks the task as completed, the very same FSM is used to process the invoice and send out an emailed copy to the customer. This will be an accurate invoice, without any data loss, and the customer can then proceed to make the payment through their preferred mode- from credit card payments to cash, without having to wait for hours for paperwork to be processed. All this information is securely stored on the cloud-based platform.

Creating a great first impression

Your image is a core part of your operations. Certainly, you don’t want to come off as disorganised- and your customers will be quick to note this with issues like missing records, outdated reports, lateness, and improper assigning of tasks. On the other hand, having a modern digital solution integrated into your field service operations will enable you to make a great first impression, showing the level of professionalism with which you offer your services.

Customer access

FSM platforms like FieldElite also give the customers themselves access to the system, through their own dashboard. This is particularly handy given that there are cases where the customer will have multiple jobs to be carried out- like property managers who keep on having cases of plumbing accidents, electrical faults, and cleaning service needs in the different buildings that they are in charge of.?

Through the customer portal, they will be able to make appointments, track the history of repair and maintenance jobs carried out on the property, and follow up on queries. What’s more, together with the IoT where FieldElite links to ecoVaro, one can have an interactive energy management system in place to keep accurate tabs on the energy consumption, efficiency, point out areas where repairs are needed, and have technicians come over- with the bookings being made through the FSM.

Enhance Customer Experience And Score New Business Opportunities

Customer service is a key aspect of your operations. When your customers are well tended to, with their needs being met in a timely and proficient manner, it wins you their loyalty, and they’ll be more open to sending referrals your way- growing your market share. Feedback- from testimonials on your site to the reviews on your social media handles, also aids in this- and you want to have satisfied clients who will put out a good word about your brand. By investing in field software for service businesses, you will increase your employees? productivity, monitor trends, improve communication between your head office and the technicians on the ground, all of which come together to increase customer satisfaction.

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