CLIENT OVERVIEW
An innovator since its founding in 1921, Illinois-based Pekin Insurance provides a complete portfolio of personal and commercial insurance, including a full spectrum of life offerings as well as P/C and health. Pekin’s over 800 employees serve more than 900,000 policyholders in 21 states. With combined assets of $2 billion, Pekin supports a distribution network of 1,500 agencies and 8,500 independent agents.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As part of their enterprise-wide Digital transformation, Pekin had undergone a Cloud migration as well as data modernization, which included implementing Hadoop as their data platform. However, because data was still being hosted on-prem, there were significant limitations in data accessibility, which resulted in prolonged wait for insurance rewriting queries and delays in daily report production. As a consequence, Pekin also struggled to derive the right value from their data and reports.
[...Because] data was still being hosted onprem, there were significant limitations in data accessibility, which resulted in prolonged wait for insurance re-writing queries and delays in daily report production.
SOLUTION OFFERED
As Pekin was already working closely with ValueMomentum for the overall enterprise transformation initiative, including the initial Data and Cloud Migration, Pekin turned to ValueMomentum as a trusted partner for their migration to Snowflake.
“ValueMomentum knows our current data framework, challenges, and platform really well,” elaborates Josh Edwards, Head of Data Science/Director of Data Management. “As we look at our deadline, ValueMomentum, being a trusted partner, is very well suited to jump right in and help us achieve our goal.”
The project began in June 2020 with the bold goal of completing implementation by October 2020. ValueMomentum was engaged to assist Pekin through the Development, Pre-Production, and Production stage. This included designing the infrastructure, security, network, data movement, and validation process. Going in, Pekin had two major concerns: (1) lack of internal experience using Snowflake and (2) the possibility of data breaches, as migrating to Snowflake would require the transfer of highly sensitive data.
With the help of ValueMomentum, Pekin designed multiple architecture diagrams and proof-of-concept to ensure the security of the migration. Pekin was also able to efficiently migrate not only their historical data load, but also their ongoing daily data load—a complex process that required converting thousands of tables in multiple programming languages into SQL before loading them into the Snowflake database. Moreover, the rigorous documentation provided by ValueMomentum allowed Pekin to seamlessly transfer knowledge between the teams as well as keep communications consistent throughout the project.
VALUE DELIVERED
Through close collaboration with the ValueMomentum team, Pekin was able to overcome the project’s challenging timeline, and is now on track to complete their migration to Snowflake by December 2020.
For Pekin, the initial investment driver was cost-savings—with a one-third predicted reduction in functional operational costs, the migration to Snowflake is predicted to pay for itself by year end. In addition, as a cloud-based solution, Snowflake can store historical data efficiently and endlessly, as well as scale elastically, easily connecting with existing tools at Pekin.
Speaking to the overall project, Edwards explains, “With ValueMomentum’s expertise, we were able to migrate our data platform from on-prem to the Snowflake AWS. This migration will allow Pekin to shift significant resources from maintaining the data platform to quickly creating business insights and value for our business partners.”
“This migration will allow Pekin to shift significant resources from maintaining the data platform to quickly creating business insights and value for our business partners.”
By allowing Pekin to generate reports near real-time and derive valuable insights from their data for agile decision making, the Snowflake migration will put Pekin one step closer to their goal of becoming a truly digital insurance company. Looking forward, Edwards explains, “Pekin is driving towards a data-driven culture, and this platform [Snowflake] is the lynchpin of our transformation.”
