Boosting financial transparency to gain new insights

ARAG Group is a leading legal insurance company operating in 19 countries. As the largest family-owned enterprise in the German insurance industry, ARAG is internationally focused on legal expense insurance and wants to provide access to justice for all, independent of income or social background. With its innovative products, ARAG manages 11.9 million legal insurance policies and achieves a consolidated annual turnover of €2.2 billion. 

Building on its global success, ARAG aims to continue to grow its legal insurance business across all regions and markets. However, with operations in 19 countries, it had become increasingly challenging to gain rapid insight into finances on a group-wide level. Compiling quarterly and annual financial reports was cumbersome and slow. 

With different teams and departments requesting financial data and business reports in different formats, the workload for each country organization was continuously increasing. Manual processes of collecting and analyzing business metrics was complex and time-consuming. 

Additionally, the group’s international businesses vary widely in size. Some organizations had more resources, processes, and systems in place to deal with corporate reporting than others. The central finance team wanted to support all countries more effectively so they could gain meaningful insights faster, independent of the size of their
operations.
 

Taking advantage of virtual data integration and flexible data modeling

To streamline data management and financial reporting, ARAG has decided to standardize on SAP ERP applications.This step helped the group to exchange data between business units more easily and become more agile. As a result, ARAG can now compile group-wide financial reports significantly faster and generate new insights in days rather than weeks. However, some larger country organizations had created their own data and analytics landscapes with non-SAP solutions, which resulted in losing the valuable context of SAP ERP data. Combining all data in a single data warehouse would have slowed down the project. What’s more, the different requirements of all the countries involved would have resulted in an overly complex implementation. Instead, ARAG wanted to leverage the existing
solutions, be they SAP Business Warehouse or third-party applications, for central group-wide reporting. With this in mind, they opted for SAP Datasphere because it enables standardization of data across different sources with advanced virtual data modeling. 

Ulrich van Meerbeck, Team Lead SAP Business Intelligence at ARAG Group, explains: “Our analytics strategy for finance is mainly based on SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, and focuses on speed, efficiency, and
interoperability. We wanted to use what was already there and maximize the value of our business data by making all data more accessible across countries and teams, regardless of the data sources and front-end tools for
business intelligence. With SAP Datasphere, we found a solution that allowed us to move quickly and integrate existing sources easily without having to replicate data and create new redundancies and costs. By combining SAP Datasphere with SAP Analytics Cloud, we can also offer our country organizations and other teams an attractive and complete analytics solution with powerful visualization features.”

ARAG chose its Spanish operations for the proof of concept, and worked closely with experts from SAP, SAP partner DMA Solutions GmbH, and the local team, led by the Financial Area Coordination Manager