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. Their trip protection plans reimburse travelers for nonrefundable trip expenses if they must cancel or interrupt a trip due to unforeseen events like illness or weather, and their short-term medical plans provide high levels of medical coverage for international travel. In addition, Seven Corners was recently voted a top travel insurance provider, and their client list is impressive.
Though Seven Corners has a forward-thinking business intelligence and data analytics team, they relied on manual processes and weren’t always sure they could trust their data. This made it difficult to identify the best ways to improve the business and make the most of their time and resources. They wanted to improve their ability to base critical business decisions on the best data.
Seven Corners chose to partner with Onebridge and, together, we modernized their data strategy and boosted their business intelligence efforts. Here’s how we were able to help them solve their top two BI and data analytics challenges.
Challenge: Time Wasted on Manual Processes
Before working with Onebridge, Seven Corners planned out an intelligent reporting process in line with their abilities. We helped them to optimize reporting to take less time, be more reliable and less manual. Rather than consisting mostly of spreadsheets and unchangeable reports, we helped them to automate the process.
"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 that wasn’t created in Excel or already automated required IT support each time changes were needed. Seven Corners also required a more trustworthy data source, in large part because different departments defined specific data fields differently. Onebridge helped them to standardize those definitions across the business so they could create a single source of truth and deliver on customer demands more efficiently.
“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.”
With our guidance, the Seven Corners team put together a data governance and data warehousing strategy that could be used by multiple stakeholders. Together, we engaged all aspects of the business to put together a trustworthy warehouse.
“This is our first real production warehouse that has validated and trusted data in it so we can actually have a single source of truth,” says Brubaker. “Until we started working with Onebridge, we had many ‘sources of truth’ with disagreement around which one was the actual system of record. We had great success with Onebridge providing dashboards for us that could not only be used by internal customers but also by our partners, carriers, and other external customers. They log into our Partner Portal and now have access to Power BI dashboards and tools that Onebridge has provided.”
Challenge: Fluctuating Development Needs
Brubaker’s team has an agile backlog they are continually working through to complete the BI/data analytics-related items their stakeholders have requested.
“As we are going through these items, our fairly small agile team doesn’t always have every type of expertise available to complete the item,” says Brubaker. “At various points, I may need a visualization person, or an ETL person, or a data architect. Finding a way to constantly fulfill those changing needs is a real challenge.”
With Onebridge managed services, Brubaker could fill those gaps by buying a block of hours for exactly what his team needed.
“Onebridge provides me with the exact right person at the right time,” says Brubaker. “I can grab a visualization person if I need them. If I need a data architect, I can get that. If we are working on ETL, I can get a specialist in ETL. Whatever resource I need for a particular agile item, I can get the right resources for the right amount of time, and get that item completed by an expert.”
Why Onebridge?
In Brubaker’s words:
“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.”
Are you interested in taking your business intelligence and data analytics efforts to the next level? Our experienced business intelligence experts and data analytics consultants can help you use your data to make better decisions and grow your business. Contact us to find out how we can help you activate your data so it’s usable, accessible, and valuable.
