CASE STUDY - Empowering Nationwide Agents with Dashboards and Reports to Reach Sales Targets
Commentary by Lori Grose, Project Lead, Nationwide Insurance
and Ravi Ranjan, Consulting IT Architect, Nationwide Insurance
Nationwide Insurance has successfully operated for more than 80 years, with more than 3,500 exclusive agencies across the country. In recent years, the property and casualty side of Nationwide, which brings in close to 80 percent of its overall business, needed better access to information to reach its sales targets.
In 2006, Nationwide chose the Teradata Data Warehouse Platform to create a single data source that would consolidate all sales and policy information. In addition, Nationwide selected the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform to integrate dynamic enterprise dashboards into its reporting system. This made it easy for agents to view sales activity at a glance.
In 2008, Nationwide launched Revenue Connection, one of the organization’s most mission-critical implementation projects of the year. This BI application monitors the degree to which Nationwide’s property and casualty team is achieving its key strategic objectives and goals. Specifically, end users now have access to the policy information they need to achieve their sales goals and run their business.
Dynamic Enterprise Dashboards Support Informed Decisions
Revenue Connection delivers easy-to-use dashboards and reports to Nationwide’s agents and field management. End users can access visually engaging dashboards that incorporate Adobe Flash and advanced visualization widgets using Adobe Flex Builder.
End users can see graphical displays of data with prior year comparisons, data in year-to- date format, or 12-month moving formats to determine trends. In addition, they can access product or policy details previously not available.
Currently there are 100 reports and more than 30 dashboards in Revenue Connection. This level of innovation, using state-of-the-art dashboard technology, demonstrates Nationwide’s desire to stay ahead of its competitors.
The ETL layer of Revenue Connection, also from Teradata, sources data from approximately 30 interfaces and then standardizes, integrates, and loads the data into approximately 60 tables. The parallel architecture of Teradata enables the ETL process to load millions of transactions in a couple of hours. Currently the database size is 750 GB, and new data sources are in the process of being added to Revenue Connection.
The reporting layer, built using MicroStrategy, uses approximately 120 views to report the data to nearly 10,000 end users. These views utilize the unique capability of Aggregate Join Index to provide faster response times. The capability of MicroStrategy to run against large databases enabled the team to achieve aggressive performance results. Dashboard response time is 10–20 seconds and the reports run in 4 to 45 seconds, depending upon the amount of data. While many other business units have attempted to create dashboards and scorecards, no one within Nationwide achieved the performance results meeting these complex dashboard requirements.
The Business Impact of Revenue Connection
Revenue Connection has completely changed the way Nationwide utilizes data. With Revenue Connection, corporate executives, sales management, and agencies can see visualizations of data in the same layout regardless of level. In addition, they can drill down into the specifics of individual policies and products when needed. Previously, reports presented data that was summed. There were no options to represent data visually, display trends, or access policy details.
Leveraging state-of-the-art dashboard technology from MicroStrategy, the application has proven to be a powerful tool for Nationwide agents and field management. Agents can see an overview of their production in an easy-to-read and digestible format or the actual policy-level details within seconds. They can view this information as tables or graphs, and they can view as much information as they desire.
Since implementation, Revenue Connection has improved productivity in some units by 20–30 percent and increased trust in the numbers that the system provides.
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