Fortifying growth trajectory for a leading warranty service provider with data analytics
Background
A need for growth and scaling operations calls for a Data Transformation Journey
The client was looking for ways to transform their invoice services to provide consistent, timely and efficient consumer services, from processing claims and reimbursements to repairing & replacing devices. Staying ahead with old models of invoice systems was no longer possible. Hence the client decided to modernize and streamline their data landscape and partnered with Systech to helping create a more strategic approach to serve its growing population of customers and partners and increasing the performance of its IT systems.
Business Objectives
Between management of over hundreds of vendors, insurers, and processing thousands of payments and claims, they were faced with greater volumes of data than ever before.
About the Company:
Our client is an American extended warranty service provider for consumer electronics and appliances, trusted by millions of customers and offered by top retailers including Amazon, Costco, Staples, Sam’s Club and Tesco.
To support its growth, the client sought out the following objectives:
Challenges
Operational agility & a fast growing customer base demanded performance from their existing data environment. Key challenges included:
- Disparate sources of invoicing and other financial data affected the quality and consistency of data in their downstream processes, including financial and operational insights
- Excess of manual labor. Invoice processing was difficult and time consuming. Existing invoices were stored in a PostgreSQL database, with each invoice processed individually. For each record, updates were made line-by- line, which was manual and intensive.
- High query timing. Existing data sets were de-normalized & table values were not mapped to each other. This leads to high query timing.
- Limited Analytics. Current NetSuite platform that stored all payment transactions & ledger records was used as a bookkeeping tool but had limited capabilities for more sophisticated financial analytics. It was difficult for the organization to draw actionable insights from their own data to improve their business processes.
Solution Overview
Systech implemented a full data warehouse, integration & visualization environment to support the growing operational & analytical needs of the client
Data Marts & Dimensional Modelling
Data marts were built using dimensional modeling over the span of 3-4 months. These data marts were aggregated to become the full Data Warehouse.
Custom GRID Application
Systech collaboratively to also build a custom GRID application with engineers at the business that triggered Informatica workflows to push NetSuite entries from data sources. This streamlined uploads for the finance department: previously some uploads and automatic and some were manual. Now all uploads were automated.
Streamlined data lifecycle
Through the implementation of Informatica PowerCenter, the organization could thereafter streamline the data lifecycle and build a centralized data hub.
Visualization for insight driven advantage
The organization also benefited by the implementation of Tableau. This data visualization tool enabled deeper analysis, exploration, and visualization of their financial data.
Value Delivered
Improved data systems and operational processes result in a competitive advantage
- Clean, consistent data in one view. The new data landscape matched everything that the database had on record. All transactions were logged into the database, no matter the source.
- Faster query performance and end user access. Custom-built GRID application reduced 200 manual hours of work/month to only 40 hours of work/month to do per load of data.
- Enhanced analytics and insights. Since the data warehouse was built dimensionally, end users could converge data subsets from different marts natively using Tableau. Faster query performance was achieved.
- Streamlined payment fulfillment. Transactional data of over 30 venders were streamlined and migrated to the new platform, making in-depth analytics possible.
- Efficient operations. Invoice processing became automated for Accounting, Financial & Analytics teams. Manual-entry for invoicing was eliminated and payments were completed in one week instead of three.
- Improved technological versality and functionality, positively impacting the quality of their analysis helping facilitate a faster speed-to-market, increase profitability, streamline operational processes, eliminate shrinkage, and more.
