A World Class Data Analytics Team

Xoomworks partners with one of the world’s largest insurance groups  and builds a dedicated, world class team to produce quality reports to the Group-wide Management Information and Reporting Unit.

The Challenge: Lack of central reporting

Founded in 1872, the client is one of the world's largest insurance groups with a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and other markets. 60,000 employees serve customers in more than 170 countries.

The client was aware that there were various untrained reporting teams within their global organisation. They were also producing duplicate versions of reports with no joined-up strategic view on how to get the best value from their reporting suite.

15 months ago, during a planned visit to Xoomworks’ Nearshore development facility in Cluj, Romania , the client asked Xoomworks whether they had the expertise to build a Data Analytics Team capable of helping them drive some real value with their Analytics reporting tools.

The Solution: Build a small team of experts

Xoomworks had already partnered with the client in building a truly value-add Ariba Managed Service team. The client felt that they wanted to replicate this arrangement with a skilled team of Data Analysts operating from Cluj, Romania with management of the service from Xoomworks UK headquarters.

Xoomworks and the client put forward a proposal that would allow a dedicated team to produce quality reports to a “Group wide Management Information and Reporting Unit”

Key for the client was that Xoomworks could provide a solution that would:

·         Ensure that the relationship between the Data Analytics team and the eventual consumers of the data would be built on trust

·         Build up a detailed knowledge of the client business, understand the key elements in their Procurement data and the vision and objectives in their Procurement functions

·         Understand the key business systems and underlying data structure to ensure that the data is extracted efficiently and completely

 The Results: World class reporting

“The Xoomworks team started by improving the templates for the client’s pre-defined reports, which helped the client understand more about its data,” explained Nic Hutchins, the Managing Director of Xoomworks. “To address the problem of multi regions producing duplicate reports, the team also created overview sheets which gave the client a comparative view regarding each countries evolution.”

To give the client a more user-friendly experience, enhance the security of reports, and to significantly decrease the time spent in creating the initial report, the Xoomworks team utilised dashboards. With the new dashboards, the team recorded efficiency gains of 60-70%.

Crucial to the success of the service has been the way that the dedicated Data Analytics team has been able to communicate directly with senior stakeholders based in all of the clients’ global centres. This one-team approach has been at the core of this successful engagement.

Rising to the challenge

A great example of this came when the client CTO asked the Data Analytics team to produce a certain type of graph that he had drawn on a piece of paper, scanned and sent to the team via email. The team produced the graph below, using excel macros, in just over twenty minutes. (see below).

Nine months on, since the start of the engagement, the client continues to see real value in the service and is currently evaluating the possibility of expanding the team size with greater ownership and scope of service to be delivered.

With responsibility for global reporting safely in the hands of the experts, the Xoomworks Data Analytics team has been able to work hand-in-hand with the Client organisation to drive enhancement, development and adoption projects globally.