The Team is the Key: ERGO Dashboarding story

History of Sales Dashboard Initiative’s beginning

Back in 2021, ERGO Baltic sales needs had reached a critical point, necessitating better solutions. Sales had fragmented data analytics and information exchange with multiple files across 3 Baltic companies. The desire for improved sales analytics, coupled with the implementation of new source systems, necessitated the combination of data from various sources and the implementation of more complex calculations. With its disintegrated data, the existing ecosystem was no longer sustainable for these long-term needs.

In the insurance industry, a big part of data is viewed, consumed, and analyzed in table format. From the overall picture, business users needed to be able to easily deep dive into incredibly detailed views and be able to combine data with ease from different business areas (which sometimes can be enormous data amounts) to gain a full and detailed picture at the same time. Another requirement for sales was the ability to internally broadcast reports, i.e., scheduling report sending. These are all features that SAP Business Objects handles adeptly and flexibly. ERGO made a strategic decision to develop Sales dashboarding, with the necessary sales analytics, leveraging its existing proven technological stack of SAP HANA for data warehousing and SAP Business Objects for data analytics and data visualization.

The Scandic Fusion and ERGO Baltic data warehouse teams had already been collaborating on data warehouse and data analytics solutions and their maintenance and development for some time before the dashboarding initiative was started. With a strong track record of accomplishment, the Scandic Fusion and ERGO data warehouse teams joined forces with the ERGO sales team as business owners and were set to start work in 2021. The project was split into iterations, leading to the end of 2022, when it took finished form with all the parts in scope delivered to business users.

Sales dashboard in the present

It is now mid-2024, giving a decent time to evaluate what has happened since the project finish line was crossed back in 2022. One of the misfortunes sometimes is to discover that the beautifully created dashboard or any other solution, in the end, is not used by the business and lingers forgotten on its own. Certainly, this is not the case with ERGO and the Sales dashboard. With business users being transferred to the new solution in SAP Business Objects and the Sales dashboard improving report information broadcasting and performance tracking. Overall processes are standardized, and there is a centralized and improved overall process transparency.

Over time, additional business needs arise and are being integrated into the Sales dashboard. Technology improves and changes, and SAP products come with new possibilities with upgrades, making continuous improvements possible. To be fair, certain items in the Sales dashboard depend on Excel files, but these are centralized and used as inputs where and as needed. For certain needs, SAP Business Objects also refreshes Excel files from OneDrive. However, Excel is not used for its analytical purposes but as a centralized source for input.

^"Our cooperation with Scandic Fusion over the past four years has been nothing short of exceptional. Their expertise in data warehousing and business intelligence has significantly enhanced our capabilities, allowing us to develop robust and insightful dashboards that drive our business forward. The dedication, professionalism, and collaborative spirit of the Scandic Fusion team have been key to our success, making them an invaluable partner in our journey towards data excellence.
_{Olga Beile, Head of DWH department in ERGO Baltics}

The existential question – how was the project’s success story achieved?

It would be excellent to answer with a perfect guidebook with detailed instructions. Yes, it is a combination of many ingredients, including iterations, planning, guidelines, experience, competence, project management, etc., but having a high-performing team cannot be replaced by any of these. The right answer is … the TEAM.

There is no bulletproof prescription for creating a high-performing team, but we can give a small glimpse into some ingredients that have worked for the Scandic Fusion team.

A safe space with a common goal

Even though we are an information technology company, we at Scandic Fusion value human connections very much. Here a part of the success was also the good harmony from everyone involved enabled by good connection, communication, and a common goal towards succeeding. It was a pleasant environment with trust instead of stress as components and with collective understanding from all parties. In any project, a safe environment is especially critical in the moments when there are hurdles to overcome. In this project, which stretched for two years, there were many unexpected challenges and tricky questions to be handled. It is not a sprint, but a marathon to run, and highly motivated, responsible individuals and their persistence is a desired trait.

The ability to explain

Another trump card is the ability to explain work and processes that happen in the background of Sales dashboard visualization to business in the language it understands. Working collaboratively with business generates better outcomes, encouraging collective ownership and responsibility for the produced outcome. The skill to explain what and how functions behind the beautiful tables and graphs is a part of the project’s success. One must get the business owners on board to be sure that what they have desired is what they get, that they understand the new process of where and how to update their sales plans, where the data comes from, and what kind of calculations are applied. Many hours were spent on defining the glossary, agreeing on the business calculations, and testing. It does not matter if the graphs and designs look nice; it matters that the business users understand what they see and have easy-to-use navigation and simplicity on how to navigate through the Sales dashboard – that is what makes it shiny and successful.

Fun

At least in this, the Scandic Fusion team’s friendliness with bits of humor sometimes helped to lift the spirit and create a feeling that, as a team, we can achieve everything. We spend at least half of our awake hours working, and a family-like and safe place creates joy in working. In this project, the Scandic Fusion team was incredibly lucky to work with an equally friendly ERGO data warehouse team and the business owners - sales team. It formed into a nice, self-organized, bubbled environment where we worked towards the shared project’s vision.

With this, as a project manager, I send enormous thanks to the Scandic Fusion team members who made this happen and continue every day to make the magic happen, as well as the ERGO data warehouse team, which trusts our team and gives us challenges to hack.

As the ERGO business owner of the project put it, it was one of the most interesting projects with the best team. I must humbly agree that what makes a project a success is the team. It has been a team effort from both ERGO and Scandic Fusion.

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