How implementing self-service data can transform operations and make you a data-driven organization

To take advantage of data’s full potential, it needs to be immediately accessible, understandable and able to be easily used by those inside and/or outside your organization. To deliver this you need to provide self-service data.

What are the benefits of self-service data, and how can you adopt a data-driven approach to help your employees and stakeholders become more efficient and improve decision-making?

Using the example of our client, insurer Lamie mutuelle this blog explains how implementing self-service data can transform your operations.

Lamie mutuelle specializes in health and property insurance, and gives all of its employees a 360° customer view through:

• An executive dashboard that includes an overview of the client portfolio
• Complete customer files to improve in-house knowledge
• A single data hub to feed the CRM and the member area

Organizations understand the value that data has to drive greater efficiency and better decision-making. For example, in our most recent study, respondents explained that data helps them work together more effectively, innovate within the organization, and become more competitive.

When you make data freely available to employees across your organization, you also save them precious time by allowing them to easily reuse reliable, readable information to manage their workloads..

Opendatasoft lets you connect to multiple data sources and collect all your data in a single catalog that everyone can access internally and/or externally, through secure, controlled access rights. This makes it easy to create and share data-based apps, web pages, management dashboards and key performance indicators to improve internal efficiency and demonstrate team performance.

Lamie mutuelle had very specific goals when it launched its data project – it wanted greater control over its data so that it could deliver tailored, more efficient services to its customers. Opendatasoft was shown to be the ideal platform to meet these needs.

In 2015, Lamie mutuelle chose to outsource its IT to an external provider, as it didn’t then have the internal expertise to run and scale technology. However, this strategy had limits, as Michael Decriem, Lamie mutuelle’s CEO explains, “By this organizational choice, all the value gained from our data was placed outside the company. This penalized us on two levels: not only did we lose contact and closeness to our customers, but we were also unable to deploy certain applications on the platform that our external provider offered, restricting us in our development strategies.”

In 2019, Lamie mutuelle therefore decided to bring IT back in-house to strengthen the customer relationship and enable easier regulatory reporting. It wanted to better understand the needs of its customers and offer them relevant, tailored services. The primary challenge it faced was to take charge of its data by unifying it and making it understandable to all.

To meet the goals set at the start of the project, Lamie mutuelle’s teams established a data roadmap with two main focuses:

Improving data use via dashboards and visualizations

Lamie mutuelle’s teams quickly identified data’s potential in four areas:

• As a means of improving internal decision-making
• To guide the organization’s strategic choices
• To help customers to find the services that were the best fit for their needs
• To assist the company in choosing the best services to offer to particular customer groups.

Developing an internal data culture

Lamie mutuelle wanted to do more than just implement decision-making improvements on an ad-hoc basis. It wanted to involve all its employees in creating a new, data-driven organization. By promoting and sharing data internally, Lamie mutuelle now gives all employees the resources they need to work more efficiently.

Over the long term, Lamie mutuelle aims to make its use of data a key differentiator, reflecting its developmental goals through an innovative,
agile data framework focused on its current and future customers.

Thanks to Opendatasoft, Lamie mutuelle is meeting all of its goals:

• Integrating partner data in real-time (rather than its previous monthly update)
• Interfacing with new partners and tools through a new data API
• Using data control and customer knowledge to personalize the customer relationship
• Empowering internal teams with automatic reports on the impact of digital marketing campaigns
• Enriching customer data with exhaustive, high-quality public data from the Opendatasoft data hub
• Providing fast, seamless access to information for all employees

Lamie mutuelle made Opendatasoft the cornerstone of its information system. All the data collected internally, and externally by partner organizations, is centralized on ODS. It is then shared via the platform in multiple formats for a range of uses.

Thanks to Opendatasoft, Lamie mutuelle has been able to democratize internal data access and use. For example, dashboards have been created to allow employees to monitor key indicators and use this information to drive improvements..

As soon as a new customer joins Lamie mutuelle, a record is created in the company’s Opendatasoft portal. These include key pieces of information (associated beneficiaries, payment amount, etc.) that help employees select the right services to provide, as well as optimizing day-to-day operations.

Lamie mutuelle’s teams also feed the CRM and customer area with data collected on the Opendatasoft platform.

Lamie mutuelle has now begun work on its “ODS 2” project to improve in-house understanding and access to data. The goal is to provide more relevant visualizations and data experiences, tailored to each employee’s level of data understanding.

The implementation of Opendatasoft has had an immediate impact on the company’s employees. Emmanuel Macak, Director of Finance and Administration, talked about the benefits he has seen at our last meetup.

Implementing Opendatasoft as part of Lamie mutuelle’s IS generated multiple benefits for the finance department, both in terms of data security and reduced processing time.

The finance team used to receive an enormous volume of data from partner organizations, with no real solution in place to process it. This totalled over 800,000 lines per month, in a variety of formats depending on the partner. This had to be transformed into 50-line entries, using only Excel.

Implementation of the platform has allowed Lamie mutuelle to optimize many daily tasks. It has created a range of data information dashboards, particularly for demographic monitoring. This helps the company better predict and prepare for strategic decision-making, as well as plan budgets more accurately through access to high-quality, comprehensive data.

Moving forward, the finance team is aiming to generate files from ODS that can be used directly in their accounting software, improving both day-to-day activity management and underpinning more informed strategic decision-making..

Thanks to ODS, Lamie mutuelle has successfully achieved its goal of making internal data readily available. Despite the size and importance of the project, it has quickly and easily taken control of its data. The secret of its success? A platform that’s accessible to all, and that can democratize data through visualizations and advanced sharing features.

“The Opendatasoft platform has revolutionized the operation and organization of our company by transforming it into a data-driven organization. By linking our managers to data in real-time, the platform allows us to be agile and adapt to changing market conditions. ” concludes Michael Decriem.