We had a great time unveiling Provident Lane to the team at REI Super. We showed what REI Super’s data looks like in a modern analytics platform. Their team learnt how they can easily drill into their data – or ‘touch’ their own data, which helps to overcome the issue of data residing in multiple systems.
Our data analytics platform, Provident Lane, helps business users, regardless of their title or role, to ask their most pressing questions against a single version of the truth. This helps provide visibility to performance indicators and trends, and then guide users through a process to perform deeper analysis.
We extended this showcase by another hour with the REI team who were highly engaged, asking incisive questions, and excited by the possibilities that their new data analytics capability can now provide for their strategic initiatives.
The Challenge?
What does the beginning of a data and analytics program look like? Well, it begins with collating years of historical data about members and their interactions with REI Super. Step 2 is checking this data for quality issues and reconciling it to published reports.
We do all this in Provident Lane. And then we enrich the data from REI Super with external data sets, and watch all this good data begin to populate a suite of battle-tested, interactive dashboards that enable the REI Super team, and our team of commercial data analysts, to explore the performance trends relevant to REI Super’s members and employers.
How easy is this to do? Well, the core member data is contained in thousands of individual reports. Through time these have become held in different formats, and with different logic – like how a member’s status is derived. There are many common data quality issues we encounter in working with fund data – this is less about ‘bad’ data and is more about data consistency.
The REI Super team brought plenty of questions and theories to our launch session, our job was to leverage their data to provide the data-driven insights they were looking for.
Zero training analytics
Our goal is to make the analytics experience so easy that new users require no training and they can begin to use our analytic tools immediately. Its pleasing to see user’s jump right in and beginning exploring their data so quickly.
Our users have all sorts of questions about their membership and how it is changing, or how the external environment is affecting their fund – from a data perspective. The REI Super team is experienced and have loads of acumen and curiosity. What they haven’t had is access to the data in a format they can easily ask questions about.
What’s next for Provident Lane and our REI Super?
“From a Day 1 perspective, we already can see how much more we will be able to use. We are looking forward to the next stage where data visibility turns to actions. We believe that the work with Laneway Analytics will lead to powerful micro targeted campaigns that will allow us to be far more relevant and timely than we would otherwise have been.”
Our mission is to continue to keep adding more data sets to Provident Lane to answer more complex, nuanced questions the super fund business wants to pose. We will continue to make the data analytics experience easier, more personalised, and relevant to each user’s role within any super fund.
Thank you, REI Super.