Case Study - Modernizing the Insurance Data Layer

Overview

Builders Mutual Insurance Company, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a mutual insurance provider specializing exclusively in the construction industry. Established in 1984 by the North Carolina Home Builders Association (NCHBA) as a self-insured fund to address the challenge of affordable workers’ compensation coverage for residential builders, the company transitioned into a mutual insurance company in 1997, assuming all fund business and continuing its commitment to the construction sector.

Over the years, Builders Mutual has expanded its services beyond North Carolina to include the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The company offers a comprehensive range of insurance products tailored to the construction industry, including Workers’ Compensation, General Liability, Property, Inland Marine, Commercial Auto, Builders Risk, Umbrella Liability, and Crime coverage.

With a workforce of over 500 employees and partnerships with more than 5,000 sales agents, Builders Mutual continues to support the construction industry through specialized insurance products, safety education, and a commitment to customer service.

The Problem

Builders Mutual Insurance was struggling with delays in getting actionable insights from their raw input data. The root cause of these delays lay in the sizing limitations of their on-premise hardware and the licensed software available to them. Additionally, manual data pipelines regularly broke, causing further delays and data quality issues. As a result, BMIC's business operations were hindered, and they found it challenging to compete with other insurance companies that had more modern and efficient data systems in place.

The Engagement

Our engagement with Builders began with a thorough review of their reports and stored procedures (implemented in T-SQL) to understand the nature of their data model and how they were cleaning and modeling data from source systems into the consumption layer for their Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). This manual effort was time-consuming and required significant resources. To accelerate analysis and conversion, we introduced Snowflake's SnowConvert tool towards the end of the discovery phase.

Through this collaborative process, our team gained a deep understanding of BMIC's business challenges and identified opportunities to modernize their data layer. We worked closely with their technical and business stakeholders to validate assumptions and ensure that the proposed solution met their needs and aligned with their strategic goals.

The Solution

We proposed a comprehensive solution to migrate Builders' on-premise EDW from SQL Server to Snowflake, leveraging our expertise in data engineering, modeling, and machine learning. Our approach involved:

1. Migrating stored procedures that performed data ingestion, cleaning, and modeling into Snowflake.
2. Rebuilding the EDW structures as-is on top of Snowflake.
3. Synchronizing data from source systems via Fivetran.
4. Introducing Coalesce for malleable and dynamic parts of the data model, enabling their data team to make changes and adapt to changing business requirements.

Our solution addressed the core issues plaguing the data layer, including hardware limitations, software constraints, and manual pipeline breakages. By modernizing their data infrastructure, we enabled Builders to unlock new levels of efficiency, agility, and competitiveness in the insurance market.

The Outcome

The implementation of our solution had a profound impact on Builders Mutual's business operations. Key outcomes included:

1. Reduced processing time: The longest query, which took 40 minutes to run on the on-premise warehouse, was reduced to under 1 minute on Snowflake.
2. Increased agility: BMIC was able to consider more strategic follow-on projects on top of their Snowflake ingestion and transformation layers, leading to a proper data warehouse refresh with per-department data marts.
3. Improved competitiveness: By modernizing their data layer, Builders gained a competitive edge in the insurance market, enabling them to better respond to changing business requirements and customer needs.

Our work with Builders Mutual Insurance demonstrated the value of partnering with a professional services firm that brings a wide range of technical skills to drive lasting change and impactful returns for customers. By modernizing their data layer, they were able to unlock new levels of efficiency, agility, and competitiveness, positioning them for long-term success in the insurance market.