Submitter
Eshwar Pastapur, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Trustmark Voluntary Benefit Solutions
Company
Trustmark Insurance Co.
Industry
Insurance
Business Challenge
Trustmark Voluntary Benefit Solutions is a division of Trustmark Co. Trustmark offers universal life, disability, critical illness and accident insurance at the worksite through payroll deduction. One of the challenges faced across the organization is commonly expressed as “we have lots of data but minimal meaningful information.” The challenge facing Trustmark is that data is in silos across multiple functional departments, limiting cross-functional access to data and sources, and stymying comprehensive analysis. Increasing pace of business and deluge of available data, insights are often delivered too late, reducing business values.
Analytics Solution
The objective of this initiative is to provide a business intelligence solution to help produce better business decisions via timely, accurate and more comprehensive analysis of available Trustmark data. The benefit of this capability cultivated a data-driven culture within Trustmark. The executive sponsor was the senior leadership team of Voluntary Benefit Solutions, who were responsible for the overall direction of the project. A data governance board provided direction and overall approval of business terms and common definitions. The project was executed by various business areas and IT shared-services functions. The organization was able to leverage an agile-like project management approach with iterations delivering keys metrics every six to eight weeks.
Impact
The initiative brought significant improvement and impact on providing “just-in-time” information to the Trustmark business stakeholders with ability to drill down to detailed information. Within months of displaying past-due bill metrics on a dashboard, the past-due bill metric was decreased by 18%, significantly reducing the amount of past due bills. The detailed tracking and trending of the payment processing data provided a mechanism to reconcile millions of dollars in missing payments for the finance department. The intangible result achieved was that it enabled each functional business area to establish ownership, accountability, and a cleansing process of its data sources to provide better downstream analytics.