Optimising Data Management & Reporting
The Challenge
Our customer had grown significantly over a decade, through organic growth and acquisition. This situation – in addition to the standard issue of disparate systems for core customer servicing and platform provision – had resulted in a heavily fragmented data estate.
Alongside this fragmentation, the customer was struggling with high levels of duplication in data and inefficiency in infrastructure and business process. As is often the case, these shortfalls had led to high levels of manual intervention and had resulted in a number of business developed applications that were being used for aggregated reporting across the organisation and into external bodies. Ultimately the organisation was concerned they were leaving themselves open to a range of data security and GDPR risks.
The Approach
Rather than jumping straight into a technical consolidation project as might be expected, our approach focused first on identifying the organisation’s information requirements. This allowed us to create an efficient data landscape, that was sustainable and based upon a “collect once report often” principle
We designed a data landscape that pulled data from the initial entry point within the organisation – creating a “golden source” for all items – making sure the flexible reporting suite allowed users to access and report on this information in a safe and secure manner, in line with their requirements.
The Outcome
Initially, this approach necessitated a much longer delivery timeline to clarify requirements and ensure complete deduplication of multiple data sources from the legacy systems. However, the optimised model has provided a more cost-effective solution over the long term due to the clear separation of data storage models from reporting requirements. These cost savings were derived from the reduction in manual interventions leading to faster processing and fewer errors as well as the benefits of a leaner technical environment.
Most importantly though, it has improved accuracy and consistency of reporting to the business and the regulator.
