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A Powerful Problem Loan Management Solution for Lenders in the Digital Age

July 2, 2020 CRM News and Info

Everyone in the banking industry is following the news, you see the statistics and the predictions. There is no doubt that there are going to be problems in your loan portfolio. Smart lenders should be asking:

Have my policies and procedures kept pace with the changes of the last decade, and am I prepared to execute them in a digital space?
Is my staff assembled, aligned, and trained to work out problem loans according to best practices and the chosen strategy of the bank?
Are we equipped with technology to enable efficient problem loan management at a high quality?
I know problem loans are coming, what should I be doing right now?

To help answer these questions, Crowe has developed a Problem Loan Management Framework.

In our recorded presentation “Identify and Address Problem Loans With Technology and Foresight” we discuss these three different areas in detail:

Identification
- Problem Loan Management
- Covenant Testing
- Annual Review
- Financial Statement Receipt and Review
- Delinquencies Review
Assessment and Monitoring
- Loan Documentation Review
- Site Visits
- Financial Condition Assessment
- Borrower Conversation
- Security Perfection Assessment
- Collateral Valuation
- Pre-workout Agreement
Strategy
- Bankruptcy
- Foreclosure/Liquidation
- Restructure/Return to Lending Group
- Exit (Borrower driven or loan sale)

Plus, we look at the kind of people, policies, procedures, and technology that can help.

To address the issues outlined in our Problem Loan Management Framework, we have developed the Crowe Problem Loan Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365. This solution makes it possible to stay on top of, and even be proactive with, distressed borrowers in good times and bad, including:

Deferral tracking
Watched asset reporting
Reserve calculator
Relationship monitoring
Action item tracking
Touchpoint reminders
Problem loan onboarding

Take action now to prepare for a wave of problem loans.

With the right guidance and technology, you can take care of your borrowers, your organization, and your books. Crowe services and solutions can help you find and address your credit portfolio risk.

Request more information and assistance for managing problem loans

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner

www.CroweCRM.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

All Def Digital Strikes Deal To Land New Series For Television

June 24, 2020 Humor

All Def Digital and Sky-backed producer Jupiter Entertainment have struck a deal to adapt the hip hop and comedy platform’s digital media series for television.

The two companies have struck a partnership to adapt All Def Digital’s library of content, including music formats The Crate and Bar Exam.

All Def, which was founded by Russell Simmons, was acquired by Culture Genesis, the LA-based digital studio whose investors include rapper T.I, Grand Hustle Records’ founder Jason Geter, NBA star Baron Davis and venture-capital firms Betaworks and Mucker Capital, last year.

Culture Genesis co-founders Shaun Newsum and Cedric J. Rogers (below) will work closely with Jupiter Entertainment President Patrick Reardon, and Vice President of Development Chris Spry on the adaptations. Reardon, in particular, has experience in this space, working on projects such as Time: The Kalief Browder Story and #FreeMeek during his time as head of television and film for Roc Nation.

In addition to The Crate and Bar Exam, projects currently being adapted include comedy series Dad Jokes and the hip hop music format Traffic Jams.

The Crate is a format challenges music producers to create a beat on the spot with the use of random objects. It gained global notoriety when Doritos launched a beat-making competition with Busta Rhymes called Blaze The Beat (see below). Bar Exam challenges hip hop artists to guess the performer of a song based on a few bars of music.

The deal was brought together by independent producer for Jupiter Michael Lappin and Sean Kilbane on behalf of Culture Genesis.

“All Def and Culture Genesis have a history of producing authentic content that promotes Black culture,” said Reardon. “There’s a clear and immediate need for more quality programming that amplifies the voices of diverse creators. Through this partnership we hope to create a wealth of content across all platforms that supports that mission.”

“Having a TV production partner of Jupiter’s caliber is critical to the continued success of our vision of elevating both our amazing talent and our content,” added Newsum. “We couldn’t ask for better partners as we bring our slate of hit shows to TV.”

Source: Deadline

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The Humor Mill

API Success: The Journey to Digital Transformation

June 16, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, enable external and internal consumers to seamlessly access, interact, and engage with a company’s data and functions. APIs essentially bind different parts of a value chain together even though the underlying components may be based on different systems, technology, or supplied by different vendors.

The use of APIs can be easily seen in the marketplace through the web of interconnectivity developing between popular SaaS and PaaS providers, along with partners and the developer community. For instance, the customer service management platform Service Now can interact via APIs with the customer master data in your NetSuite customer relationship management (CRM) system so when a customer calls your organization, all of the caller’s correct details are readily available. You know who they are and you don’t keep them frustrated on the phone for 10 minutes while you type in all their information.

APIs make the needed information readily accessible, promote the rapid development of new capabilities, and even greatly reduce the amount of rework required should you switch to a different vendor or datasource. Or, another example of the power of APIs is how your corporate travel site can “talk” to Trip Advisor (via APIs, of course!) to help manage your itinerary, share feedback on the hotel or airline, and help you sync travel plans with colleagues or customers.

The Power of APIs

When companies have access to data and functions via APIs, it empowers them to make smarter decisions, improve customer satisfaction, drive innovation, and identify new areas of business. In fact, many businesses have identified APIs as their largest enabler of digital transformation strategies. According to Harvard Business Review, Expedia.com, for instance, generates 50% of its revenue through APIs and eBay, 60%. The benefits of using APIs are many, including enabling new digital products, reducing time to market, opening new partner opportunities, enhancing customer experiences, and preparing for the future.

To reap the full benefits of all that APIs have to offer, your organization’s API strategy should reflect the key business drivers and goals upon which you are focusing in the market today. Say, for example, you supply a network of large companies with components. And they use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like SAP. Ideally, you would provide them with API endpoints so their order management system can talk to your order management system without any manual intervention, leading to automation and a lot of time saved. But how do you build an API strategy that will enable this digital transformation?

Developing a Successful API Program

Developing an API program is a significant undertaking that can have a profound impact on your organization. Because it can drive new products, new innovation, new customers, and new revenue streams, it’s not a task to take lightly. Even though APIs are important, many companies still struggle. We have found that it’s not enough to just start using APIs. In our experience, organizations that establish a comprehensive API strategy, whether the APIs are being consumed internally or externally, are the most successful.

For starters, you need to plan your API strategy like it’s a new business. That includes:

Aligning to the business goals
Identifying supporting technology
Measuring performance
Engaging your ecosystem

Aligning the business goals with the API program is important, as is identifying the appropriate use of technology and supporting architectures. KPIs are for measuring the success of the API program and ensuring that it is meeting the goals of the business. And engaging the ecosystem is important, whether this is for external API consumers or even internal API developers. It is important to know and understand your audience, what capabilities they need, how to support this audience, and how to build an effective communication plan for your program.

As you can see, building a successful API program is not just about technology. You need to define the foundation of your API program in terms of its strategy, monetization approach, target audience, goals, etc. And then evaluate and find an appropriate technology upon which you can execute the API lifecycle. Think about it. It’s like any other product that you produce. You wouldn’t launch a new product without a go-to-market strategy, would you? APIs are the same. They need nurturing and support to grow into their full potential.

In his new, easy-to-use book, “API Success: The Journey to Digital Transformation,” API and tech expert Nelson Petracek sets out the criteria, questions, and thought processes you need to consider to build and deliver a successful API strategy that is technology-agnostic. Petracek draws on his decades of customer use cases and interactions to layout a guide that your company can use to create and run a successful API program.

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The TIBCO Blog

Apache Kafka®: A New Approach for Providing Digital Communication

May 8, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The world is changing fast and it seems like no one can keep up. But, the one aspect that has remained constant is the need for communication. Application communication and integration are critical capabilities when it comes to rapid business change and adaptation. However, effective communication can be a challenge, especially in the digital world. That’s why we welcome new technologies like Apache Kafka that can help you create a truly digital enterprise that can quickly respond to business changes with a tightly coupled communication infrastructure.

Apache Kafka: A Newcomer to Messaging Communications

One of the newest players in the field of messaging communications technology, Apache Kafka, was developed by LinkedIn in 2010 and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Kafka was originally designed to provide a distributed approach to streaming logs for data processing. The software provides a common framework for streaming real-time data feeds with a focus on high-throughput and distributed workloads.

Kafka has become the de-facto standard for open-source streaming of data for stream processing. Since its launch, Kafka has been rapidly adopted by businesses to build a digital nervous system for stream processing and event-driven architectures. The platform provides scalable, high-volume, persistent data distribution in real-time. Kafka’s new open-source approach allows users to deploy messaging communication technology quickly and simply. By leveraging free, open-source software, developers can stand up Apache Kafka nodes and stream data for numerous application types in minutes.

Do More with Kafka & TIBCO Messaging

Scaling application layer deployments to enterprise-level volumes and integration points can be a challenge. With the support of TIBCO^® Messaging, your enterprise can implement a wide-scale adoption of Apache Kafka. This combination gives your developers, managers, and enterprise architects the core functionality of Kafka with the support of TIBCO.

Users can now fully integrate Kafka into their enterprise nervous system. TIBCO’s support for Kafka allows organizations to expand their existing usage of the system for added integration points, simpler stream processing, and native support for streaming analytics. Together, TIBCO and Kafka facilitate a new approach for better integration and enterprise messaging.

Get started with Apache Kafka with this whitepaper to learn how you can adopt the platform into your enterprise nervous system for integration services, data analytics, and data distribution for stream processing.

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The TIBCO Blog

Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster

May 1, 2020 Big Data

(Reuters) — Reports of the demise of the digital advertising market due to the coronavirus outbreak appear exaggerated as the tech giants dominating the online ads business, Google and Facebook, said this week they saw early signs that the worst could be over. Their remarks countered Wall Street expectations of a devastation of the market as hard-hit brands in travel and autos, traditionally big ad spenders, have pulled marketing dollars and as small businesses, the lifeblood of big tech companies’ businesses, have shut down.

At Google’s parent, Alphabet, first-quarter total revenue grew 13% from the previous year to $ 41.2 billion, while Facebook‘s ad sales rose 17% to $ 17.44 billion. They issued first-quarter results that factored in only two weeks of the widespread stay-at-home orders in the United States. But both companies also reassured investors that revenue for the first three weeks of April showed signs of stability, following lower revenue in March.

Alphabet, Facebook, and Snap credited direct response ads, or ads that solicit a direct action, such as clicking a link, using a coupon code or downloading mobile games, for propping up sales during the pandemic. Such ads help advertisers get the most for their money by encouraging immediate response from audiences and are easier to measure, since brands can see how many people clicked on a link or took an action after seeing the ad.

Brand advertising that is used to spread awareness and name recognition for a company, but whose effectiveness is often more difficult to measure, was harder hit. Alphabet said on Tuesday brand advertising declined on YouTube in mid-March, when the pandemic accelerated in the United States.

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Ad prices drop when marketers lower their spending and demand for digital ads decline, and direct response advertisers have been taking advantage of that, said David Campanelli, chief investment officer at ad agency Horizon Media. “This will likely continue through 2Q as we expect pricing to remain low for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Facebook executives said on Wednesday they expected direct response advertising to continue to drive ad sales and that the coronavirus pandemic only reinforced the importance of the strategy. Still, Facebook was cautious, given economists are forecasting a global downturn in the second quarter and “if history were a guide, would suggest the potential for an even more severe advertising industry contraction,” said David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, during an earnings call.

Alphabet warned that the second quarter could be difficult because the early April trends may not hold. Snap, which owns messaging app Snapchat, said it would shift resources on its ad sales team to serve direct response advertisers better, due to the success of the category.

But Twitter alarmed investors on Thursday as it pointed to a 27% decline in ad revenue as a sign of what the company has seen so far in April. Twitter’s ad business is heavily event-driven and “the suspension of major sporting leagues in March will have hurt its bottom line and will continue to do so as long as social distancing and stay-at-home measures remain in place,” said Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Securing Remote Working In The Digital Age

April 27, 2020 BI News and Info

Part 15 in the “Controls and Risk Management” series

With multiple benefits for both employers and employees, remote working was already quickly gaining traction, and the current situation is further accelerating this trend. To be able to continue operating in geographies where confinement is being enforced and enable employees to keep their jobs, many organizations have opted for a remote working approach.

A sustained trend with multiple benefits

This trend started many years ago, though, with the emergence of the technology that allows employees to access organizational IT systems from anywhere in the world – as they would if they were within the four walls of the company.

As a matter of fact, the number of people who work from home has increased by 91% in the last decade, and by 2028, it is expected that 73% of all departments will have remote workers.

It’s also undeniable that this is driven by quantifiable benefits with estimates that average business could save $ 11,000 per remote worker and 65% of respondents claiming that they are more productive in their home office than at a traditional workplace. But it’s not just about productivity or costs, as people who work remotely at least once a month are 24% more likely to be happy.

As a result, I can only concur with Jennifer Christie, head of human resources at Twitter, when she stated, “We’ll never probably be the same.” People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way. Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”

But there is also another side to the coin. In a previous blog (Internal Control – From Necessary Evil to Operational Excellence), I referred to ISO31000’s definition of risk management, where a risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, be it positive or negative. Well, there are unfortunately also threats associated with the positive aspects (benefits) of remote working. These will need to be addressed by the organization.

Going back to statistics, a concerning finding by a study from OpenVPN shows that 90% of IT professionals believe remote workers are not secure. And over 70% think remote staff members pose a greater risk than onsite employees. Note that this is a perception, of course, but it still needs to be addressed – especially when considering the fact that there has been a 10-fold increase in cyberattacks in some regions at the moment.

As a result, organizations need to target the root causes of both external threats to deter both the cyberattacks and the insider threat. IT professionals are concerned that internal actors may pose a significant level of risk to the organization’s IT infrastructure.

Effectively addressing these challenges

Managing system accounts and ensuring the correct authorization assignments

By putting in place a sound identity and access management process, companies could more easily manage access to enterprise applications, be they cloud or on premises, via user-role- and attribute-based access. Companies could further implement multi-factor authentication to improve security. And to remove the burden of excessive login procedures, simply putting in place single sign-on would help them achieve this objective without additional workload for the employees. Effortless security, in a way!

Protecting the applications that run your business

A company’s internal systems make an appealing target for hackers, as they run business-critical processes and house sensitive corporate information that can be used for cyber espionage, sabotage, or fraud. To prevent data breaches, organizations could monitor business applications for suspicious activities (i.e., anomalies) and attacks. They could also analyze the business transactions themselves for fraudulent or unusual patterns. By correlating insights, companies could take a proactive approach and identify threats early.

Addressing data protection and privacy concerns

In some cases, users need to access sensitive data in the course of their daily tasks. To protect them from unwelcome suspicion as well as to protect the organization’s crown jewels, companies could implement data-masking tools so that unnecessary information is hidden by default but can be revealed on demand. And of course, data logging will help cyber investigations if a data breach does occur. Data logging not only helps to identify the culprits but also to understand the scope of the breach and to notify impacted parties and regulators in a timely manner.

These three processes create an additional security layer for the organization, but this would nevertheless not be at the detriment of the employee. Indeed, these processes would run in the background and not create additional workload for the employee. It’s a win-win situation, I believe, since all parties would feel better protected.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a quote from SAP’s chief security officer, which I find extremely relevant as I believe it really represents our mission statement: “SAP is not in the security business, but in the business of securing our customer’s business.”

What about you? Has your company changed its security policies and procedures to adapt to recent events? I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on Twitter @TFrenehard

Improve the implementation and operation of your SAP solution by exploring how SAP Next-Generation Support real-time channel Schedule an Expert can help you in this process.

This article originally appeared on SAP Community and is republished by permission.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Digitalist Magazine

The Integration Platform that will Accelerate your Digital Business

April 6, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Businesses across the globe are operating in a bit of a fog right now, trying to figure out how best to adapt in order to weather rapidly changing market conditions. Those businesses that are able to do so in times of crisis will also be able to rapidly adapt in the future when new opportunities surface.

Quickly adjusting business operations and even evolving your business model to maintain business continuity requires agility and scalability. One of the best ways to set yourself up as an agile, scalable business is by implementing a digital business platform.

A digital business platform is a foundational hub that integrates your systems and data as well as enables your people, apps, and devices to communicate in a dynamic setting. To help you understand the benefits of a digital business platform, and to choose which vendor provides a suitable solution for your business, independent analyst firm Aragon Research has published The Aragon Research Globe™ for Digital Business Platforms, 2020.

The report discusses the value provided by a digital business platform and ranks vendors it found best met the requirements for building such. As the only major analyst evaluation for digital business platforms, this report scores vendors across a number of key capabilities including Integration, Process Automation, IoT, and Analytics.

A good digital business platform solution enables new digital business strategies by allowing its users to proactively reach customers and partners. While traditional approaches still require your customers and partners to reach out to you as the first point of contact, leading solutions place customers at the center, allowing you to reach them wherever they are, through a variety of channels.

TIBCO was named a leader in The Aragon Research Globe™ for Digital Business Platforms, 2020 for the second consecutive year, noted specifically for its flagship iPaaS solution, TIBCO Cloud Integration. It’s streaming analytics and visual analytics capabilities—part of the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Platform—also contributed to TIBCO’s placement in Aragon’s report.

Aragon subscribers can access this report as part of their subscription, but for a limited time, TIBCO is making an abridged version of this report available at no cost or obligation. Download the complimentary report to help you compare digital business platforms and decide which might be the right investment for you. Then, try TIBCO Cloud Integration for 30 days at no charge to get started on your digital business platform strategy.

Aragon Disclaimer: Aragon Research does not endorse vendors, or their products or services that are referenced in its research publications, and does not advise users to select those vendors that are rated the highest. Aragon Research publications consist of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Aragon Research provides its research publications and the information contained in them “AS IS,” without warranty of any kind.

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The TIBCO Blog

Taking it one Step Further with Digital Seals with Blockchain Technology

March 30, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Let’s pick up the story of Noah, a CRM consultant, that implemented an XRM solution with an IIOT integration for Oliver Smith, production manager at a manufacturing facility.

As Oliver’s company works with a variety of sensors and production machines, those were used as a place to collect data. Noah recommended Connect Bridge as the integration platform to get the data into the XRM system that he set up. Initially done as a Proof of Concept, this project was then further developed, and it quickly became a full-blown system.

So currently we have:

Data coming from multiple sensors and production machines
Microsoft Dynamics 365 with a dashboard showing that data
Connect Bridge to make the integration of the above possible

nomaintenance noworries isometric.png.pagespeed.ce.B4ZbAdklMV Taking it one Step Further with Digital Seals with Blockchain Technology

Houston, we have a problem!

Oliver can now access machine reports from his new dashboard. It is good to have them on hand to provide to internal and external auditors. He has the production process documented in his dashboard, and he is confident about machine performance. Besides, if a customer has a complaint, he can check the machine reports referring to a specific date.

But if the machine reports are all that important… how about security?

Can he trust the data on his own machine reports?

Can he be sure they have not been tampered with?

Oliver again turns to Noah, with these data integrity issues on his mind.

Becoming the Right Man for the Job

Fortunately, Noah has a good knowledge of the latest technology. He knows that it is now possible to use Blockchain technology for ensuring data integrity.

Nonetheless, he is not a Blockchain specialist. His “trick” is to use CB Digital Seal with Blockchain Technology from Connecting Software.

CB Digital Seal is integrated into the software that is already in use, like SharePoint. Noah has even watched a demo of CB Digital Seal for SharePoint.

He can see the application of this in Oliver’s project. He sees he can smoothly integrate it with the XRM system that was developed.

My Sensitive Information Going to the Blockchain?

Before the project starts, however, Oliver still has one concern. He is worried when he hears that the project uses Blockchain. He likes the idea of using state-of-the-art technology, but he does not like the idea of having his machine reports copied or sent outside his network. It is sensitive information, after all.

Noah reassures him that is not the case: only a digital fingerprint of each sealed file leaves the network, never the file itself. The file always remains within the safety of their original environment.

Going Live with CB Digital Seal with Blockchain Technology

With that concern covered, the project launches. It goes live in a matter of weeks. Plus, it is actually finished at a fraction of the cost Oliver had anticipated when he heard about a technology that was so “fancy”.

He is also happy that using this technology does not mean the transaction cost is higher than with others. Each transaction cost is, in fact, less than 1 cent.

He chose to have all the machine reports sealed as they enter the system. New reports are sealed right after they are created. Old reports were gradually sealed after deployment so that all relevant documents and files are now sealed.

This gives him peace of mind, and it also means that he and all other end-users who work with the software just keep on working as usual. No interaction with the system is necessary unless you want to verify the seal of a specific report.

Oliver can now prove no one tampered with a machine report from the moment it was sealed. He has also found that the digital seals are timestamped. He knows that will be essential, for example, when an audit comes.

Takeaway

For Oliver, our production manager, his favorite thing about this project is that he can now prove every step of the manufacturing process with sealed machine reports. He can also obtain 100% tamper-proof evidence about machine performance. All this in a project that was up and running quickly.

Noah, our consultant, was pleased to be able to provide a Blockchain solution without having to become a Blockchain specialist. What’s more, he was not only able to provide a solution, but he was able to do it much faster than if he had hired a company specializing in the area to build everything from scratch.

Would you like to see for yourself what CB Digital Seal with Blockchain technology can do for you?

Why don’t you talk to our experts? They will be glad to provide you with a free demo or answer any questions you might have. Call us at +1 (720)-577-3030!

xana framed.png.pagespeed.ic.cVqanoYude Taking it one Step Further with Digital Seals with Blockchain Technology

By Ana Neto, Connecting Software

Connecting Software is a 15-year-old company. It produces software for synchronization, migration and integration. Currently with 40 employees, Connecting Software is a truly global company. It spreads through 4 different countries: United States, Austria, Slovakia and Portugal.

We are also a proud “Top Member 2019″ at CRMSoftwareBlog.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Digital Marketing Best Practices for Insurance Companies

March 27, 2020 CRM News and Info

Disruption within the once-staid insurance industry is creating a major buzz. The activity has been labeled, among other things, as a digital transformation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Regardless of what you call it, disruption is occurring because consumers gravitate toward customer experiences that are on par with Amazon, Uber, and Netflix.

After all, our population is skewing toward digital natives. Roughly 71 million millennials are in the market for automotive, homeowners, and renters insurance — among other types of coverage.

Gen-Z, the generation right behind millennials, represents 61 million people who mostly started using digital while they were still infants. No doubt the eldest among this group, in their early 20s, are shopping for insurance right now.

shutterstock 1606098901 Digital Marketing Best Practices for Insurance Companies

Entrepreneurs, including quite a few millennials, are responding to opportunities created by legacy insurance providers without solid digital marketing strategies. This has led to a rise in insurtech start-ups that garnered about $ 2.2 billion from investors in the first half of 2019 alone — easily outpacting the total $ 2.6 billion invested in all of 2018.

What’s more, only 35 percent of insurance customers say they’re satisfied with current providers, which translates to a book of business of about $ 1.5 trillion up for grabs globally.

Word of mouth and a landline (sales and marketing approaches based on closing a single sale that worked for insurers decades ago) aren’t how current generations purchase insurance coverage.

Legacy agencies must craft a carefully considered holistic digital marketing plan that’s radically different from what would pass just a few short years ago. They need coordinated and orchestrated campaigns across digital channels that provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Marketing automation platforms hit all of these points by consolidating and automating marketing activities — such as email campaigns with conditional logic, web-based content creation and management, and digital advertising. These platforms enable lifecycle marketing that gives a transparent view into the entire journey of each individual prospect and policyholder.

Because marketing automation brings so many functions under one umbrella, it’s a powerful engine for capturing and presenting data about audiences and specific customers. In fact, it’s the ultimate catalyst for growth marketing (sometimes referred to as “growth hacking”).

Growth hacking is enabling companies to achieve impressive revenue in relatively short timeframes based on identifying the most lucrative and efficient areas for growth. Ultimately, it employs marketing tactics that enable companies to garner more leads, convert at higher rates, and nurture customer connections for the long term.

Marketing automation platforms typically offer functions known to be universal tactics for hacking growth and fueling revenue.

We’ve captured the highlights on some of the top tactics for insurance marketers who want to dive right in with growth marketing (and how marketing automation platforms like Act-On can help them execute these strategies).

Top Digital Marketing Tactics for Insurance Companies

Current buyer personas. Your marketing strategy should start with at least an outline of several types of buyers for your insurance offerings. With the aging out of baby boomers and the influx of digital natives, it’s more important than ever to make sure your marketing resonates with your ideal customers.

If you don’t already have up-to-date personas defining your audiences, this post will guide you in creating buyer personas, mapping the journey for each, and identifying relevant content. This is a great place to start because it provides the basis for executing the most important digital marketing tactics.

A top-notch website. Your site must be attuned to the customer journey, meaning it must provide a user experience that accounts for your audience’s understanding of your insurance products. The user experience should start at beginner-level prospective policyholders who have little-to-no understanding of what their end goal should be as far as your products and services.

Information that’s most prominent should be highly accessible for the beginner, navigation should be intuitive, and finding information that enables your visitor to advance along the purchasing path should be easy.

Connecting with an actual person who can offer high-touch customer service also should be easy — whether via email, telephone, or on-site chatting. It goes without saying that audiences expect pages to load at lightning-fast speeds and sites that are optimized for mobile.

Offer high-quality content. Modern audiences are researching heavily before they buy, as well as seeking recommendations and comparisons. In fact, 78% of consumers say that relevant content increases their purchase intent for a brand’s products and services.

Tracking analytics to determine which content gets the highest traffic is the key to consistently producing high-quality content. We break it down here with seven questions you should answer as you develop your own quality content.

As always, it comes down to putting your customers’ needs first. Ask yourself which content is going to be most useful for your customers and how can you deliver it in ways that make the most sense for them?

Create irresistible offers for gated content. Creating great content that your audience needs is a key step in attracting prospective policyholders and generating digital leads. Everything from whitepapers and eBooks to webinars and online learning courses provide the opportunity to capture data from your audience by motivating visitors to input their personal information via a conversion form.

By collecting this data, you capture information about high-intent insurance purchasers. From there, you can add these people to your marketing lists to nurture them through the buyer journey. This post about content distribution provides greater detail about gating content.

Execute a thoughtful email campaign. Using a surgical approach with your email campaigns increases the chance that your audience is going to engage. Your personas will help guide you in your email messaging, as will data collected via gated content.

In the course of building your email distribution lists and reviewing the data, you’ll learn so much more about your audience and their behaviors. This opens avenues for highly targeted and personalized email campaigns.

Once you start building intelligence on your audience, the possibilities are endless. Learn how by reading this post and going deeper with strategies for B2C campaigns here.

Invest in learning and implementing SEO basics. The value of time spent on SEO cannot be understated.

71 percent of consumers surveyed said they did digital research before buying insurance.

Search engines are the most common starting point. Twenty-six percent of U.S. car insurance buyers and 35% of U.S. life insurance buyers use search results to inform their purchases. So optimizing your site to attract more prospective policyholders is well worth the time and effort.

While some insurance brokerages choose to employ search engine optimization (SEO) experts full-time, simply sticking to SEO basics can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Most insurance providers are likely performing many of these tactics. However, very few have a marketing plan marrying this work with a powerful marketing automation platform.

Marketing automation software simplifies and streamlines these initiatives for an approach that is cohesive, unified, and backed by data to drive sales growth.

Act-On Has Everything Insurance Marketers Need to Grow Their Brokerage

These tactics are just the beginning of how insurance providers can use marketing automation to grow their digital presence, achieve significant gains, and succeed in this disruptive era. Everyday, our insurance customers find new and fruitful ways to use the Act-On platform.

Read more about marketing automation for insurance brokerages by downloading our free eBook, “5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages.” It’s packed full of great information about what marketing automation is, how it helps insurers improve marketing processes and results, and why it’s the perfect fit for your insurance agency.

Lastly, if you’re ready to learn more about Act-On’s marketing automation solution, our team of experts would love to speak with you about your current situation and how our software can help you take your brokerage to the next level. Simply click here to request a demo with a marketing automation specialist.

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The Advantages Of Digital Supply Chains: A Podcast With Johannes Drooghaag

February 15, 2020 BI News and Info

Welcome to episode 17 of the “Digital Supply Chain” podcast. In this episode, I interview Dr. Johannes Drooghaag (also known simply as JD and @DRJDrooghaag on Twitter).

We had a wide-ranging conversation on digital supply chains, covering many aspects including manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and cybersecurity.

Check out the podcast and the transcript below.

TR: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain podcast, and I am your host, Tom Raftery.

TR: Hey everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP, and my special guest on the show today is JD. JD, would you like to introduce yourself?

JD: Well, thank you, Tom. First, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Johannes Drooghaag, but it’s shortened to JD because that’s much easier and it doesn’t hurt so much to pronounce. I started my career in industrial automation, the classical way, putting a lot of robots and a lot of sensors and a lot of PLCs in a factory. And through time, I learned that there are other options and that we can do a lot more with the data we are collecting and turn it into information – or what I prefer, actionable information. After some 25 years in corporate roles, I decided to start my own consulting company, and I’m focusing on those two fields: on the one hand and the organizational side, human beings that are working with the information. And on the other side, the technology that is creating the data out of which we can create that actionable information. I’m 30 years on the road now, and I keep learning every day. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m with you today, Tom, to keep learning from you, as well.

TR: Oh dear. No, no pressure on me. So no. Okay. So I typically start the show asking the guests on the show to give me their personal definition of what a digital supply chain is. Because you know, everyone has a kind of a slightly different approach to it. It’s a broad topic. So how do you define digital supply chain, JD?

JD: Well, for me, the digital supply chain is basically the digital twin, so to speak, of the classical supply chain, which as we all know it with all the parts moving and the orders. And the digital supply chain is the digital twin in which we can do two things. We can constantly respond to what is happening because we need to respond much faster than we used to do in the past. In the past, we had mass production, we had large batches, we had orders which were sent out months before we start producing.

Nowadays we have much more dynamics. Orders are changed, we have smaller volumes, we have smaller production batches. We even want to avoid production batches. We want to create single-piece flows in our factories. And the second thing we can do is we can start simulating in our digital supply chain. We can do real scenarios without actually having to touch the process. So we can start looking for opportunities and for optimization items. We can also look back to the past and see what failed, what it didn’t do, what we were expecting that it would be doing, and how can we prevent it, and what can we learn from that. And that, for me, is the digital supply chain. The information that we, on the one hand, get from the existing supply chains, which are much more complicated than they were in the past. And on the other end, the learnings, the organizational handling of that digital supply chain.

TR: Excellent. Excellent. Very good. Very good. You started off saying that there were kind of two aspects to looking at digital supply chain. One was the human side and the other was the actionable items. You know, I’ve often said that, in these kind of scenarios, that the technology is generally very straightforward. It’s getting people to change because the hard part is is that your inkling as well as technology is generally straightforward. People are hard.

JD: Well, we can make the technology as complicated as we want, but that doesn’t lead to anything, right? So if we start with a straightforward concept, and then make sure that the people who we expect to work with it also actually understand what we are expecting from them, which kind of responses we want, then we see that there is an enormous gap because most people are already pretty much loaded with their actual work. And we need them to, first of all, have the mindset then that when the system is telling them something, they should take it serious. And now, on the other hand, they need to understand what the difference is between some kind of general status update and an urgent item that they actually need to respond to.

Now, having three decades of experience, I have learned a couple of things. First of all, people do not really trust the system because there’s always something which is not right. If we take a closer look, that means we can learn and we can say, okay, we found something in the system, which is not correct. Let’s improve it. Yeah. But the human behavior is to use that as an excuse almost to also ignore all the other things that they see in the system. And the second thing that I’ve learned is when you’re busy going from A to B and somebody is telling you there’s a smarter way you could go through C and then to B, okay. You were focused on going to B, so you’re not paying attention to that additional information. And that’s an enormous challenge on top of the normal change management and organizational challenges we already have.

TR: Yeah, indeed. And how do you overcome that?

JD: Well, the first thing that I always do with my clients is start with the people and look at what their routines are and look at what kind of information they would need instead of the information that they have. Because what I see in my experience is that most service providers make the mistake of just sending more information to the already available information. And a production manager or a scheduler or a planner doesn’t need a new report on top of all the reports they need to report or an information overview that tells them what to do and where they should respond. So, I start by filtering. I start by asking them, “if you have 20 reports and I take 10 away, which one would that be?” Yeah. And the interesting thing is that most of the time when I ask for 10, they give me 18 because they’re going to use me.

TR: Yeah. There’s a professor of journalism in New York whose name is Clay Shirky and he’s got this great quote that I love. He says, “there’s no such thing as information overload. There’s only filter failure.”

JD: Exactly. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s great. That’s great.

TR: You, you talked as well not just about the people aspect, but of the actionable items. What do you mean by that?

JD: Well, an actionable item. I always take the example of the SCADA world where I’ve spent five years all over the world. If you look at the SCADA system, you will always have a state-to-screen where the operator can see the entire refinery or the entire pipeline or any other utilization of that SCADA. But, as soon as the operator is expected to take action, that is automatically put in focus. So, at the moment that the operator is expected to take action, the operator sees that action item, and that can be a small decision; that can be a big decision. But the system automatically focuses the attention of that operator on that particular item where an action is needed. Okay.

Providers of SCADA systems have learned over the years that if you keep that action item in the entire status screen of the refinery, the operator won’t notice it because it’s just one little thing, and sometimes they have up to a thousand different, aggregated devices in the overview and an actionable item. And an actionable piece of information means that first of all, the person who shoots take action is informed in the proper way without any kind of distractions. And second, the person has a couple of options or has supporting information to make that decision. Now, if I then compare it to what I see, especially in production facilities, that there’s an operator overloaded with a lot of status written information, which that person should not respond to, and hidden in that stream is that one item where the person should respond to, well then I cannot blame him for not seeing it or ignoring it or pressing the standard button. So the popup goes away.

Actionable information means to me, “I see it when I need it.” I get the information I need to take a decision, or that actionable information informs me that something is not the way we wanted it to be, and I need to do some optimizing, or it means I need to get some additional resources.

TR: Right. A lot of that sounds like its design-led issues potentially are maybe not maybe issues … but properly designed screens and user interfaces should do away with a lot of these issues.

JD: Exactly. And then it’s also a system thing because if you look at a supply chain, then it’s not just a screen on a machine. It is a whole stream of information. And if I have somewhere in my supply chain the change, which was not part of the current planned activities, I cannot wait until that arrives at my facility. I need to respond to that with the appropriate lead time. And if that means a changeover in the production planning, and that means that I need to schedule some additional machine changeover, I need to know that in the proper appropriate time. So, we also need to add some intelligence to it. We need to add which timeframes we need. We need to add which kind of materials we need. And if we start figuring that out at the moment that it has already happened, well we are too late, especially when our supply chain is a bit more complicated then the local grocery shop.

TR: Okay. And so you, we have some customers with some very, very complex supply chains. So yeah, tying all those disparate pieces of data together can prove challenging.

JD: Exactly. I always use this lovely example from my own automotive experience. If we look at the classical … car, we have up to 40,000 components. If we look at an electrical vehicle, your favorite topic, we still have about 10,000 components for just one car. Yeah. Now if we make one change, just one change, we might have to reschedule a couple of those components in the assembly. Now, the further we go down the line in that supply chain and we make that significant change, well, the more others will have to respond to that. So supply chains are complicated and supply chains are no longer single or dual parties. The same car with 40,000 components has up to 1,500 suppliers of those components. And that needs to be managed and it needs to be managed very actively.

TR: Yeah. Yeah. If I needed them or delayed getting parts to you. Maybe there’s a coronavirus outbreak, and they can’t get their workers to their factories, and they have to hold production. It throws everything out.

JD: Exactly, and if you do that in a smart way, and this is what I really enjoy about the digital supply chain because the coronavirus is an example. We have a crisis that might impact our supply chain. Now if we have a properly built and properly designed digital edition of our actual supply chain, that’s the moment where we are capable to say, okay, what happens if we, for example, slow down this line of supply, and what does that mean for the other parts? Can we make changes in the capacity, or can we increase some … from another supplier and decrease some folio with this supplier and navigate around that crisis, and that crisis never establishes the way we thought. So we can then the next day update again, and we can really start looking forward instead of what most people in the supply chain business always tell me. We are managing the past. With a digital supply chain, we are capable of learning how to manage the future.

TR: It’s an amazing change, isn’t it? In going from older, more analog technologies where, as you write these, say people ran delays in the past, to the digital, where we’re analytes in the future. It’s… I don’t know how to phrase that exactly, but it’s a huge, huge change in the way people are now able to do business.

JD: It’s an amazing change and it’s, there’s the simple, in English, we have a wonderful, in German, it’s almost as wonderful in English, we can say, it makes the difference between reacting and acting in the classical analog supply chain management, UI reacting. You’re always reacting to things that have already happened in a digital supply tent. You can act based on the things that you know will happen because that’s the information you receive. And that’s how you can build your scenarios.

TR: Yeah, that’s it. Exactly. JD. looking forward the next five, 10 years, where do you see the biggest potential for change. Where do you see the biggest changes that are going to happen? How will they impact?

JD: Well, the biggest changes that I will see, there’s one thing that we are not yet aware of – the up to 80% of the production facilities we currently have are built in the previous century classical, uh, built for big batches, built to produce a lot of the same. And companies are starting to learn that you can still use those Industry 4.0 and the IoT and the smart supply chain solutions. You just have to be a bit more creative about how to implement them for those classical old things. So, one of the things that I am already seeing and it’s developing, fortunately, that companies are moving forward with their infrastructure, which is in some cases they still plan to use it for the next 20 years. So people stop. I’m believing that all those technologies are only available when they build something new or a greenfield facility or to purchase new machinery. We see that rolling out into the existing infrastructure and that, I believe, is a wonderful change.

TR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we had an example, I mean we have a bunch of examples with different customers, but there was one that really kind of blew my mind, and it was with Harley Davidson. It used to take them 21 days to create a custom motorbike, and when they shifted over to digital manufacturing, they brought the time of manufacture from 21 days down to six hours. Just incredible.

JD: That’s incredible. But that’s possible. Yeah. Yeah. it’s going back to what you were mentioning, going from facilities which are built to just build lots of one type of thing. And then when you try and do custom, in this case, motorbikes, it takes a lot more work and takes 21 days. When you switch to a facility which is built to be completely customizable, and your lines could be completely fluid, then you can do mass customization and then kind of lot sizes of one, and you can drop the time to manufacture again, in this case of bikes, down to as six hours for a custom Harley.

TR: It’s really impressive.

JD: That is really impressive. But it also demonstrates what is possible if you move away from the classical patterns. In some cases, that will mean that you actually need to invest in your existing machinery, in some cases will mean that you must reduce some capacity for mass production, which you don’t need anyway anymore. And in some cases, it means that you actually discover that your equipment is capable of doing much more than you thought it could. You just have to sit down and, with concepts like design thinking, most of it is logical thinking. You need to be able to investigate, to explore, to do some testing, and discover how flexible you can become. Because that’s also what Industry 4.0 is about. And that is what a smart supply chain is about. It’s not just about more data and more technology, it’s especially about becoming more flexible so you can respond to what happens on the market. Right?

TR: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. And in the case of Harley, it wasn’t that they did it in the same facility, so they kind of, I won’t say they cheated, but it took a kind of a hybrid approach. They built a second facility beside their existing facility, and then they transferred all of their staff and all their machinery into the new facility. But it was two-thirds the size of their existing facility. And yet, because it was completely digitized, they were able to then, as I say, bring the lot times down from days to hours.

JD: Yeah. But, this will happen in many cases, and sometimes you have the luxury to say, okay, I’ve got a second production facility, and I can basically redesign my existing process with a single-piece-flow concept in mind instead of batches and long production. In other cases, you will have to do that. And we did it at one major automotive supplier, which unfortunately I cannot mention by name. We did it. We did the same thing we did in the existing facility. We started with machine number one and, and eliminated all the batch containers and the batch flow and created a single-piece-flow structure around that, and then took it to the next level. And it was very fortunate that we had a very good tie-in of the ERP system from SAP at that moment. So, we could get all the production data, we could get all the settings, the proper product identifications from the system. And we were capable of building a single-piece flow throughout the production facility. It took two years because we had to do it step by step, and we could not go from the old school to the new school by just closing down the factory. But one of the results is that we decreased the capital on hand to time, which was around 18 days. We’ve decreased that to two days. So, from purchasing the material to shipping it to the next facility was reduced by more than 80%. That is serious money.

TR: That’s a lot, yeah. That’s impressive. That’s really impressive. Yeah. That’s amazing. Okay. Look JD. We’re coming towards the end of the podcast, and typically at this time of the podcast, I’ll ask people is there any question that I haven’t asked you that you wish I had?

JD: Um, one question, Tom, and that’s my second-favorite topic: cybersecurity. So if you ask me, “JD, what would be your top priority in digital supply chain? Besides all the technical opportunities we have and the organizational opportunities we have?” I would say cybersecurity has to be the top priority, because the more digitized we get, the more risk we have that something bad happens to the digitized world. So cybersecurity, big picture approach, make sure that it is by design and not by coincidence.

TR: Very good, very good. Very good. Yeah, hugely important. As we are opening up our manufacturing facilities and our logistics and everything, as we’re opening them up to the internet, we are massively increasing the threat landscape. So yeah, absolutely. Very, very important to consider cybersecurity from, as you say, from the design phase, right through … it can’t be something that you kind of cobble on afterwards, dead right?

TR: So JD, if people want to know more about yourself, what’s the best place they can go to find information about JD?

JD: Well, they can visit me always on my LinkedIn profile or on my website, JohannesDrooghaag.com. Unfortunately, jd.com was already taken. I am on Twitter. I am on Facebook, Instagram. Twitter is my main social media exposure. Otherwise, drop me a note at my website, and I will reply as soon as possible.

TR: Super, super JD. I will put those links in the description of the podcast when I publish it so everyone can have access to them. Thanks a million for taking time and joining me on the show today.

JD: Well, thank you for having me, Tom. It was a great discussion.

TR: Okay, we’ve come to the end of the show. Thanks, everyone, for listening. If you’d like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sap.com/digital supply chain, or simply drop me an email to tom.raftery@sap.com.

If you like the show, please don’t forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application to get new episodes right away as soon as they’re published. And, also, please don’t forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.

This episode was originally published on the “Digital Supply Chain” podcast.

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Like this:

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