In its medium-term management plan, which begins on April 1, 2022, Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance Company, Limited (hereinafter referred to as Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life) aims to become a life insurance company that contributes to solving customers' problems by providing distinctive products and services, and that helps agents create a prosperous future as their trusted partner, with the aim of being the first choice for consultation. One of the key initiatives in the medium-term management plan is digital transformation (DX), and the company is promoting the development of a data infrastructure and its company-wide utilization. This article introduces the company's efforts to utilize data, including the newly constructed data infrastructure led by the Digitalization Promotion Office and the ambassador system aimed at promoting its establishment and utilization.
Customer Issues
- Existing DWHs require data processing using functions, and only a select number of skilled employees can use them.
- It takes time to integrate multiple detail data extracted from the DWH, which is inefficient.
- Data extraction requires complex processing and must be outsourced to a systems company within the group, which takes about a week to obtain the data.
Benefits of implementation
Complex processing
Extract the necessary data,
Regular employees
Easy to use like
On a new data platform,
Searching, checking and extracting data
~ Processing ~ Analysis process
Simple and easy to complete
Easy-to-use UI
Utilizing data
Self-service death,
Achieve speedup
Background: Only a few employees could use the existing DWH.
Even if you request data extraction, it will take a week to receive it.
Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance, which provides insurance products primarily through over-the-counter sales by sales representatives at agencies (mainly financial institutions), is focusing on sales support for its agents. In its support activities aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of its products and services, it is important to quickly grasp changes in the world and its customers, and provide and share timely information with sales representatives, who are on the front lines of insurance sales. To achieve this, the company built a data warehouse (DWH) that aggregates data scattered across multiple business systems. However, due to licensing and operability issues, only a limited number of employees could use the system, and it mainly focused on conditional extraction of simple statement data and simple statistics.
Senior Manager, IT Promotion Department
Mr. Hiroki Okimoto
Data extraction, which requires complex data processing and manipulation across multiple databases, required a work request to be submitted to the IT Promotion Department, and it took about a week to receive the data. "In our case, we manage over one million customers, and we have accumulated a huge amount of information and data, including information on contracts (cancellations), sales activities, and customer feedback received at the contact center. Even when an agency requested data from a certain period, we often had to submit a work request and wait a week... This was frustrating. On the other hand, even if employees themselves extracted multiple detailed data from the DWH, processed and manipulated it, and then graphed it, this required a considerable amount of time and a certain level of skill, which was an obstacle to promoting data utilization to strengthen our competitiveness," says Hiroki Okimoto, Senior Manager of the IT Promotion Department at the company.
Introduction: A new data infrastructure was built that allows all employees to easily extract and process data.
Section Manager, Digitalization Promotion Office, IT Promotion Department
Mr. Shinya Hirano
To solve the first issue, the Digitalization Promotion Office, established within the IT Promotion Department, decided to build a new "data infrastructure" that would allow all employees to access all data within the company and process and analyze it easily and freely. Hirano Shinya, section manager of the Digitalization Promotion Office in the IT Promotion Department, explains the background to this: "As a company, we had a policy of making better use of the data we had accumulated to reform and improve our operations. By preparing a new Primary Data Platform (hereinafter referred to as PDP) as a data infrastructure to replace our existing DWH, we aimed to create a system (tool) that would allow all employees to quickly find and analyze the data they wanted on their own. PDP will also enable us to respond to urgent requests from agents, which will lead to stronger competitiveness."
The PDP incorporates two products from Saison Information Systems (now Saison Technology). One is "DataSpider International," which transfers data from source systems such as mission-critical system, core system, business systems, and file servers to the PDP. The other is "HULFT DataCatalog," which provides a data dictionary function for freely searching aggregated data and confirming its meaning and origin. Furthermore, by using "Paxata" for data preparation, which extracts and organizes data from the DWH, the entire process—from data search and extraction to data preparation and analysis—is carried out by employees themselves, creating a truly user-friendly data utilization platform. The implementation involved comparing the data platforms proposed by five system integrators, imagining actual data utilization scenarios, in terms of ease of data extraction, conversion, and processing, as well as ease of system maintenance. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation was conducted, with a focus on ease of use, including having some employees try them out. The above configuration was selected for implementation in February 2021.
Effectiveness: Data use spreads throughout the company through in-house training under the ambassador system
PDP went into full operation in October 2021, but with the goal of utilizing data company-wide, not just among a select few employees, internal training is essential to ensure its adoption and adoption. The company selected one or two "ambassadors" from each department to promote data utilization, totaling approximately 25 employees. Over the course of six months, the training focused on basic knowledge of data analysis and hands-on experience of data processing using PDP. The training aimed to improve the skills and know-how of the ambassadors across the company. Furthermore, the company is also developing a "bottom-up project" that solicits company-wide initiatives that collect and analyze various data to transform and innovate business processes, with outstanding initiatives being recognized. Ambassadors who have been actively engaged in data analysis for some time commented on their experience using PDP, saying, "Compared to existing DWHs, data extraction is easier. Registering a series of tasks, such as creating standard reports, allows for convenient automation from the following month." Meanwhile, ambassadors who are new to data analysis have generally given it positive reviews, saying, "It's easy to use and once you get used to it, it seems easy to use." Ambassador training will end at the end of March 2022, but with continued support from the IT Promotion Department, each ambassador will continue to provide in-house training by instilling skills and know-how into members of their departments. "This fiscal year, we have created a data infrastructure called PDP, so from next fiscal year onwards, we plan to upgrade it to make it easier to use and produce better results. We would like to expand its functions, such as visualization through integration with BI tools and more advanced analysis using ML and AI," says Hirano.
As internal data is increasingly consolidated into PDP, the scope of data that employees can extract and process themselves has expanded, and data acquisition time has also been significantly reduced. In particular, the provision of data to agents, a routine task, which previously took about a week, can now be automatically created on the day the work begins. "Creating new business through data utilization is not something that can be done overnight. Using this PDP as a stepping stone, we would like to instill within the company a culture of thinking about not only internal data, but also data from group companies and public data, etc. (Okimoto)"
Mitsui Sumitomo Primary Life Insurance Company, Limited
- Head office address: Yaesu First Financial Building, 1-3-7 Yaesu, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
- Established: September 7, 2001
- Capital: 65.795 billion yen (including capital reserve of 24.735 billion yen)
- Number of employees: 390 (as of March 31, 2021)
- Business: Life insurance business
- The content of this case study is current as of the time of the interview. The content of this case study may change without notice.