Success story

Modernizing insurance marketing reports with Tableau

Background

Our client serves one in three households across British Columbia with a variety of insurance products and related services. Recently, the company migrated its data warehouses to Redshift Spectrum, and began looking to migrate much of its reporting from an end-of-life system to Tableau. Our team was hired to jump-start this process by developing a new reporting foundation using data visualization and Tableau best practices.

Specifically, the project targeted the marketing database department, which is responsible for providing business intelligence and reporting on marketing strategy and sales and marketing performance. Prior to the migration to Tableau, the reporting system consisted primarily of numerous pages of tables used to compare different scenarios or show performance over time.

At the beginning of the engagement, the client selected a set of five critical reports for our team to migrate. Shortly after the completion of these five reports, the client brought us back to build two more dashboards focused on yet another product.

Challenge

Our client uses a relational database structure to store customer master data, and stores daily and monthly snapshots of the master data to access their history. Since one of the main applications of the dashboards is analyzing changes to the benchmark data, it was necessary to access many snapshots, which resulted in significant data source bloat and performance issues.

Our team was able to produce responsive dashboards without having to apply a complete rework of the database structure, by strategically aggregating data and reviewing the value of certain features with the client.

Approach

• Interviewed key stakeholder to understand current processes and potential gains in implementing a modern solution.

• Designed and built clearer and more actionable dashboards in Tableau to replace existing 5+2 reports.

• Installed Tableau Server on a Canadian region EC2 (AWS Elastic Computing) instance with a single sign-on configuration.

• Documented and performed knowledge transfer sessions to enable the client's team to take ownership of the Tableau solution and continue migrating reports.

Key Results

1. A modern reporting and analytics environment allowing for a safe migration and a sunset process for the legacy reporting solution.

2. A radical move from multi-page reports to visual dashboards providing faster access to key performance indicators and performance trends over time.

3. Ability to answer some business questions that were previously impossible to answer.

4. Prepared client staff for continued modernization and development.