A Vision of Growth
Risk Administration Services is a rapidly growing workers’ compensation insurance company serving the upper midwest, great plains, and western regions of the U.S.
With the implementation of Qlik Sense at RAS, departments throughout the company such as sales, marketing, finance, loss control, claims, legal, and E-learning are undergoing a cultural shift with data. They are getting information much faster and fully utilizing it to analyze and create strategies.
When Risk Administration Services (RAS) and their Chief Information Technology Officer Chirag Shukla began their business intelligence journey, they knew they needed a tool that would align with their long term vision of growth. Up until this point, Excel spreadsheets and reports from an existing BI tool had been widely used throughout the company, but not without limitations. It became difficult to sift through multi-page reports for information that would best be utilized and explained through visualizations.
“Version control gives us that confidence knowing any changes are tracked and we can easily revert back. That leads to innovation. That leads to making courageous decisions.” — Chirag Shukla, CTO at RAS
Qlik Sense Transformed RAS
Thus, they began shopping around and comparing market-leading BI tools before deciding upon Qlik Sense. “We found that Qlik was one of the fastest visualization tools, not only to develop but also to analyze,” said Chirag Shukla. After implementing Qlik Sense in less than two hours, they found that by replacing BI reports with dashboards, data consumption and literacy took a complete 180. Their user community went from leveraging data as little as once per week to once an hour.
But What About Change Management
Although Qlik Sense dashboards revolutionized the way RAS consumed data, there were still some problems with change management. Initially, they tried to manually document changes which quickly became too complicated to manage. They were finding it increasingly difficult to see what formulas (e.g. sum average, minimum/maximum, etc.) had changed between publications and knew they needed an immediate solution. Their first instinct was to use an API to manage load scripts but since they had become a dashboard-centric company thanks to Qlik, they were still in the dark about how the visualizations themselves had changed. Not to mention, the continuous refresh of data led to lots of questions about it within their finance department, causing Chirag and the BI development team to traverse through a user’s work in order to identify when, where, and how things had changed.
This less than intuitive process of investigation ultimately brought them to the question, “Why are we doing this ourselves? There should be software that should be able to do this and there should be people in the marketplace,” asked Chirag. It was at this point they began to search for a software solution that would offer them the version control capabilities they so desperately needed. Welcome, Soterre.
A Solution Is Discovered
Ryan Buschert, one of the senior developers at Risk Administration Services was attending Qlik’s annual conference when he discovered the software answer they’d been looking for. A bulleted point about a product being able to deploy a piece of an application instead of the whole thing caught his eye because up until that moment he was used to “all or none” deployment. Upon further investigation he quickly realized that this same software included what RAS needed; a version control feature for Qlik Sense. That booth was Motio and the product was Soterre.
Bring On The Version Control
Installing Soterre was quick and painless, plus, it worked synergistically with the Qlik Sense platform they had come to know and love. It became increasingly apparent that the addition of Soterre would provide numerous benefits, some obvious, and some completely unexpected. First, it dramatically sped up their ability to analyze, making version control effortless. “It’s nice to have it there as a safeguard so if we need to roll something back quickly we can, all without having to go through version-controlled scripts to figure out what changed and when. Now we can just point, click, and find the answer. The amount of time we’re saving percentage-wise is a huge number,” stated Ryan.
With Soterre in place, their finance department no longer had to worry about data quality, which led to far fewer discrepancies and questions. It even changed how Ryan approached development itself. “If I was making a major change before we had Soterre, I would make a copy before the change in case I needed to go back, but now I don’t have to do that anymore,” said Ryan.
A Competitive Edge With Audit Quality
Risk Administration Services is continuously growing and subsequently, is always searching for ways to improve and add more maturity to its organizational compliance. As an insurance company, both internal and external audits are extremely important. Soterre gives RAS a competitive edge in this domain with controls over the development life cycle. They can quickly pull up Qlik to show how they internally analyze information along with Soterre that records any sort of change, who changed it, and when, and so on.
“Compliance-wise, Soterre is going to give us a competitive edge.”
An Unexpected Benefit – Innovation
Aside from the version control capabilities Risk Administration Services so desperately desired, it gave them other unexpected benefits as well. Ask anyone from a development background and they’ll tell you how important something like version control truly is. It’s important in the fact that it makes the life of a developer easier, but equally important is the confidence it gives the person using it. For Chirag and the team, it gave them the confidence to make bold decisions knowing that everything was being tracked, and should they need to revert back it was nothing more than a simple click.
This newfound confidence led to more courageous decision making, which in turn led to a surge in innovation because the fear of making mistakes had virtually been eliminated. This sudden increase in confidence-driven innovation perfectly supports the future goals of RAS as they continue to expand.
Qlik Sense dashboards have accelerated the delivery of information at RAS enabling them to triple its data consumption.
