Seven Corners' travel insurance plans and 24/7 assistance services help people all over the world navigate their way through travel problems big and small. They protect travelers from the expenses of having to cancel a trip due to unforeseen events like illness or natural disaster. They also offer short term medical plans, so that travelers are covered whether they are traveling to or from the US. Travelers recently voted them a top travel insurance provider and their client list is impressive.
Like many businesses, Seven Corners relied on manual processes and didn't trust the data they had. The reliance on manual processes made it difficult to identify ways to improve the business, wasted time and resources, and prevented them from basing critical business decisions on reliable data.
Here's how they modernized their data strategy to boost their business intelligence efforts.
Slow, Manual Processes and Untrustworthy Data
Before working with Onebridge, reporting was time consuming, unreliable and manual, consisting mostly of spreadsheets and unchangeable reports.
"Our analysts and business users were pulling data from our transactional database. They would run reports, mish-mash them together and pull them into Excel, and then do a lot of data manipulation, etc. There was a lot of manual work and analysis to get to the data they wanted," says Brubaker.
Any report not created in Excel or already automated required IT support each time changes were needed. Their data warehouse was not trustworthy, in large part because different departments defined specific data fields differently. They needed to find a way to standardize those definitions across the business so they could create a single source of truth.
“During agile backlog planning, several items came up for both internal and external customers specifically around visualizations of data,” says Brubaker. "Before partnering with Onebridge, we made multiple attempts at creating a single source of truth for those visualizations to pull from, but they never really seemed to work.”
The inability to make changes to reports without IT assistance took much longer than self-service solutions and placed an unnecessary burden on IT resources. The manual nature of the processes created opportunities for errors and made it difficult for teams to work together from one single source of information, which reduced the value of the reporting.
Without a trustworthy source of data, reports were written off and unable to impact decision making positively. Project flows stalled and halted due to the lack of alignment and clarity that arises from untrusted data.
Adding Automation and Reliable Data to the Mix
The Onebridge managed services team worked with Seven Corners to migrate their data warehouse to the Azure cloud. We remodeled its architecture to align all departments around the types and categories of data collected. We also updated the ETL process to perform more efficiently and accurately. These efforts created a trustworthy data source that allows business users to create and modify reports on demand in Power BI rather than relying on IT resources.
Many processes were automated to save time, allowing employees to put their time toward more valuable and innovative work. Project stalls, downtime, ramp-up, and employee attrition have all reduced.
“Onebridge has a team of experts, people of varying skill sets across the entire discipline of business intelligence. They definitely bring a multidisciplinary approach to the work that they’re doing. I can always rely on them to bring in the very best person to solve the particular challenge we have.”
Intelligent Decision-Making with Reliable Data
Through working with Onebridge, Seven Corners can now base business decisions on reliable data and target vital areas of the business for improvements and investment.
Seven Corners automated their reporting processes to save a significant amount of time and ensure their data is more trustworthy. Onebridge helped them build a trusted data warehouse to store valuable data that can be automatically shared with investors and payers, a pivotal aspect of their business. They are now able to get useful insights to drive intelligent decision making through reliable data. They also have an extensive array of data visualizations for both internal and external customers to access through the Seven Corners partner portal.
"Business processes are much more standardized now because we have a validated warehouse with trustworthy, reliable data," says Brubaker. "We've also had great success with making data visualization dashboards available through our partner portal."
