As the largest financial services provider in southern Africa, Old Mutual is rightly leading the way in business analytics with its recent migration to SAS Customer Intelligence Studio 5.1.
Given its prominent position in the financial industry, Old Mutual wanted a solution with strong operating performance and the flexibility to handle its campaign management. Already working with SAS Marketing Automation 4.3, the company decided it was time for a complete upgrade, including servers, software and databases.
“Old Mutual needed to fully upgrade its Customer Intelligence platform, but more than that, it needed the work to be done with minimal downtime and in a time frame of only three weeks,” says Darryl Lawrence, BI Lead Analyst Programmer, Old Mutual South Africa.
“Essentially we wanted to implement a solution that would make our back office staff happy. They were beginning to experience a lack of integration and slower campaign processing time. Some users had reverted to Base SAS coding because they found it was faster than processing campaigns via the existing campaign tool.”
Background
Old Mutual already had over 10 years of experience using SAS campaign tools to generate customer leads, which made a SAS solution the obvious choice for an upgrade.
Old Mutual had adopted the capabilities of SAS Marketing Automation years before and it was against this backdrop that it began to upgrade its environment to SAS Customer Intelligence Studio 5.1. Old Mutual was also running SAS Management Console as an application support, with metadata generation, campaign scheduling and SAS information map scheduling.
As a growing company with an ever-growing data and customer base, Old Mutual found that its aging SAS Marketing Automation 4.3 solution was taking too much strain, and was taking too long to process campaigns and metadata in the back office. The software was taking on average 27 hours to update the Metadata server, and between seven to 12 hours to process campaigns. Many of these issues were caused by existing database integration issues and obsolete servers.
“SAS needed to provide an upgrade solution that would be capable of handling Old Mutual's extensive data, and would be able to seamlessly integrate with its server and database upgrade,” says Veronica Hodgson, Enterprise Product Manager for Old Mutual Group at SAS South Africa.
The plan - you want it when?
The challenges faced in any normal change implementation are many and diverse, but with resources stretched by an extremely tight deadline, the SAS and Old Mutual teams had their work cut out for them. Preparation talks to implement the upgraded Customer Intelligence solution began at the end of 2007. And after much information gathering, the project definition document was finalised in May 2008, after which implementation was started and completion scheduled for September 2008.
With the plan ready and the stage set, SAS Customer Intelligence Studio 5.1 was installed and operational within three weeks - resulting in huge benefits and happy back office users.
Benefits
Some of the benefits included in the upgrade were enhanced functionality, bringing the wealth management company's campaign processing time to an average of three hours, down from an average 33 hours per run.
“Our campaign tool is now completely in sync with our Unix BI platform and integrated fully with our upgraded Oracle database. We have achieved exactly what we set out to achieve,” says Lawrence.
Dressed for success
According to the joint teams, much of the success of the project can be attributed to the fact that Old Mutual, as an experienced SAS user, prepared thoroughly for its implementation. In addition, combining forces with SAS, it held daily checkpoint meetings to discuss progress updates and potential risks, and to set deliverables for the next day. It made every effort to stop problems before they could start, while being ready and able to overcome challenges as and when they occurred.
“From the beginning, we had very clear requirements and realistic expectations. The SAS senior resources also got involved and made sure they did everything in their power to get the solution running,” says Lawrence.
The success of the project can also be attributed to Old Mutual creating an environment that allowed remote access to the network, encouraging its users to get involved from day one and respecting their knowledge. Most importantly, Old Mutual did not take any short cuts; it did a full upgrade of the database, servers and software and did not simply adopt a patchwork solution.
“We selected the right people for the job and benefited from the SAS team's familiarity with our environment and from our excellent working relationship with the company. All in all, while we met challenges along the way, we are very happy with the end result,” concludes Lawrence.
Share