CASE STUDY : BUPA
BUILDING A CUSTOMER CENTRIC ANALYTICS ENVIRONMENT
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We have been fortunate to work intermittently with Bupa for over five years. The long tenure means we know the business and its data extremely well and can add quick and knowledgable expertise when called upon. One larger project was the development of a customer centric analytics platform in a new Databricks installation and a corresponding dashboard reporting and analysis suite in Power BI.
THE CHALLENGE:
Bupa is fortunate to have great data and very talented analytics teams. For the Customer Centric project what was needed was an experienced resource that could work across teams to create new applications in a Databricks environment. These teams included business teams (go-to-market, product, marketing), analytics, engineering, data governance and security. The required output was a super-charged datamart bringing all the fragmented Bupa member data into one place so a full view and knowledge of each member could be found (effectively a Single Customer View). This would empower Bupa to report from the member perspective and execute future activities from a member centric point of view.
HOW WE WORKED:
The project encompassed the following steps:
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Designing the architecture for this environment which pulled data from numerous database systems (including SAS, Synapse, Adobe, Pega), managed governance and security, and worked with engineers to efficiently deliver data daily to ADLS (Azure Data Lake) and Databricks.
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Within Databricks developing a clean datamart of all this customer data for broader analytics use. Workng with analysts on the design and contents, and stakeholders on data metrics. This saved significant time sourcing and processing data and boosted the quality of team outputs.
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Developing multiple generations of a dashboard suite working closely with business users on design, metrics, interactivity and self-service capabilities. This was a game-changer in sourcing analytics and results, while the breadth of data allowed for much deeper levels of insights.
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Fully automating this as a daily source to insight system, which profoundly uplifted confidence in data and its regular use in decisions.
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Regularly participating in weekly business tactical updates to share key analytical findings and contribute to forthcoming tactics.
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Sharing many educational and training sessions on the project and being a key ambassador of data and its use to the wider business.
OUTCOMES:
There were multi-facited benefits to the work:
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The foundations were laid for broader development of the Databricks environment with the set up of a robust architecture and the covering off of data governance and security.
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Significant time was saved for analysts with most of the key data pre-processed in a single environment so a lot of pre-processing work was avoided.
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Business users had access to key next day metrics and the ability to self serve deeper insights.
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This in turn reduced basic but time-consuming analytics requests, meaning analysts could thus focus on ore impacting and more enjoyable deeper data projects.
FEEDBACK:
"The remit was to create an environment in which business users could self-serve customer insights and business performance. Whilst Aaron’s technical skills are obvious very quickly, I was impressed with his tenacity, problem solving skills and stakeholder approach. The solution he delivered has been widely praised throughout Bupa and is leveraged daily by a wide range of users. This was a challenging project with imperfect data, many new and undocumented processes and very strict governance and risk controls. All in all a fantastic engagement and I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Aaron again."