Allow all employees to freely use data.
Build an easy-to-use "Data Infrastructure" and focus on internal training.

Starting from April 1, 2022, Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance Company (hereafter referred to as "Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance ") aims to contribute to solving customer challenges by providing unique products and services as part of its medium-term management plan. The company aspires to be the most trusted partner that agents consult with first, assisting in creating a prosperous future.

In the area of DX (digital transformation), which is one of the key measures in the medium-term management plan, the company is working to develop a data infrastructure and promote its use throughout the company. This section introduces our comprehensive company-wide initiatives for data utilization, including the newly established data infrastructure and the ambassador program aimed at promoting its adoption and active use.

Challenges

• Existing DWH requires data processing using functions and can only be used by a few skilled employees.
• Time-consuming and inefficient integration after extracting multiple details data from DWH.
• Data extraction that requires complex processing must be requested to a system company within the group, and it takes about one week.

Effects of Introduction

Background
Only a few employees can use the existing DWH, and data extraction requests take a week.

Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance, which provides insurance products mainly through over-the-counter sales by salespersons at agents (mainly financial institutions), is focusing on sales support for agents. In support activities aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of the company's products and services, it is important to quickly identify changes in the world and customers, and to provide and share timely information with salespersons, who are at the forefront of insurance sales. As a mechanism to achieve this, a data warehouse (DWH) had been built to consolidate data scattered across multiple business systems, but only a few employees were able to use it due to licensing and operability restrictions, and it was mainly used for simple conditional extraction of detailed data and simple statistics.

Data extraction, which requires complex data processing and processing across multiple databases, had to be ordered from the IT Promotion Department on a work request basis, and it took about one week to receive the data. In our case, we have more than one million customers to manage, and we have accumulated a vast amount of information and data, including information on contracts and sales activities, as well as customer feedback coming DWH, it has become to the contact center.

Introduction
Build a new data infrastructure that allows all employees to easily extract and process data

In the Digitalization Promotion Office established within the IT Promotion Department, efforts are underway to address the preliminary challenges by constructing a new "data platform" that enables all employees to access and easily and freely process and analyze all internal data.

The PDP incorporates two products from Saison Information Systems (Now Saison Technology). One transfers data from source systems such as mission-critical systems, business systems, and file servers to the PDP. DataSpider Servista allows users to freely search aggregated data, and to easily understand the meaning and output of the data.

HULFT DataCatalog provides the function of a data dictionary to check the data. Furthermore, by using "Paxata" for data preparation to extract and prepare data from the DWH, it has become a "truly easy to use" data utilization platform that enables a series of processes such as data search and extraction, data preparation, and data analysis to be realized by the employee's own naves. It has become a "truly easy-to-use" data utilization platform. In order to make a decision on the introduction, we compared the data platforms proposed by five SIer companies, imagining actual data use, and compared the ease of data extraction, conversion and processing, and the ease of system maintenance. Furthermore, as a result of a comprehensive evaluation focusing on "usability" by having some employees use the system, it was decided on February, 2021 that the above configuration would be used for the introduction.

Effects
Company-wide expansion of data use through in-house education by the ambassador system

PDP started full-scale operation in October, 2021, but in order to aim for data utilization not only by some employees but also on a company-wide scale, it is essential to provide in-house education to promote the establishment and utilization of the data. In this company, one or two "ambassadors" were selected from each department to promote the use of data, and a total of about 25 people were targeted for in-house education. Starting with basic knowledge of what data analysis is, we aimed to improve the skills and know-how of the entire company, starting with the ambassadors, by intensively conducting hands-on data processing using PDP over a period of six months. In addition, a "bottom-up project" is being developed in which various data is collected and analyzed for business innovation and innovation, and the best efforts are awarded. Here are some comments from ambassadors who have been actively analyzing data for some time now: “Compared to the existing DWH, data extraction is easier. If you register a series of tasks such as creating standard reports, you can automate them from the next month onwards, which is convenient. ”On the other hand, the ambassadors who are not familiar with data analysis yet also gave a favorable evaluation, saying, "It is easy to use and once you get used to it, it will be easy to use. The training for the ambassadors will end at the end of March 2022, but the IT Promotion Department will continue to follow up on the training, and each ambassador plans to continue internal training to spread their skills and know-how to their own members in their own departments. “Until the end of this fiscal year, we are planning to upgrade the PDP data base in the next fiscal year and beyond to make it easier to use and produce results, including linking it with BI tools for visualization and higher-level analysis using ML and AI. (Mr.Hirano)”

The data can be extracted and processed by employees themselves, and the time required for data acquisition has also been greatly reduced. In particular, the provision of data to agents for regular work, which used to take about a week, can now be created automatically on the same day work begins. “The PDP has enabled us to create new business through the use of data, which cannot be done in a short period of time. We will use the PDP as a first step, we would like to establish a culture within the company of thinking by using not only internal data, but also data from group companies, publicly available data, and other various data.(Mr. Okimoto)”

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