A private student loan company with about $400 million in loans assets. It has been operating for two years and in the next year expects to grow to $1 billion in funds distributed.
As a startup, the company sought help in developing a short- and mid-term BI strategy for their information management. This included data warehousing, BI software product adoption, IT resource staffing, and solution deployment.
Reporting had been based on spreadsheet software. In a company of less than 100 employees, three disconnected BI efforts were in place, and their system suffered from a series of problems:
As the company grows, it wants to be prepared to handle more data sources and more data volume.
They’ll also want to answer more complex questions. For instance, they’ll want to know how loan assets are performing, what credit tiers are in their portfolio, how loans are being paid back, the delinquency and index for each population of credit score and other information.
They will eventually have their own call center to service loans. Then data such as average handle time, abandonment and call arrival patterns will be necessary to help them manage their workforce and call quality.
In order to catalog the relationship between the data and the decision-making process, we performed a thorough audit. Our resulting BI strategy document and executive presentation addressed solutions around data warehousing, IT staffing, systems integration, reporting and dashboard deployment. We also developed preliminary designs and implementation plans.
As a result, NIVIS performed the following:
For 4 months NIVIS stayed in contact with the CIO and attended the company’s internal meetings to ensure that the new strategy was compatible with their business plan. Such close involvement continues to this day.
The company’s goal is to become self-sufficient. An internal reporting department will administer the new system and create reports and dashboards for power users, while stakeholder departments will create their own reports. These include marketing, product development, finance, credit management, sales, business development, operations and client relations departments.
One NIVIS consultant worked 120 days on-site to formulate the BI strategy, and then, over the next four months, assisted in implementing the first phase initiatives.
To date, NIVIS has served their IT, Finance, Sales, Operations (Client Relations), Operations (Call Center), Marketing (Product development), Marketing (General), and Credit departments.
The technologies used were SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server DTS.
Full suite of Dashboard, Business Intelligence, and reporting technologies utilized.
The application, back office, and related technology were Embarcadero ER/Studio.
Improvements increased visibility into processes. Key wins as a result of this visibility:
The tools eliminated inconsistent and invalid data from the reporting process, reducing confusion and improving decision insight.
Sizeable resources were also reclaimed when employees tasked with reporting shifted their focus from producing data back to analyzing it.
Adding full BI infrastructure and development resource staff resulted in a self-sufficient reporting and information operation. Definitions of data were mooted, and process over effective dialogue around metadata was implemented.
Corporate dashboards transformed the company from a ‘push’ information methodology to an on-demand environment, delivering the most up-to-date information to the right people as they need it.
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