Enabling faster international reporting with SAP
ARAG Group’s insurance business is spread across 19 countries around the world. Bringing financial data from all operations together seamlessly is key to understanding important business challenges and opportunities. With SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, ARAG can make data-driven, proactive, forward-looking decisions to effectively manage the group’s global growth.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Insurance | Düsseldorf, Germany | 4,800 employees | DMA Solutions GmbH |
access to key performance figures for decision-makers
response to ad hoc requests for new insights and reports
international collaboration across the group
CFO & Board Member Group Finance, ARAG Group
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.
CFO & Board Member Group Finance, ARAG Group
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.
Team Lead SAP Business Intelligence, ARAG Group
Delivering quick insights across the group
ARAG benefits from the small footprint and high flexibility of the software as a service (SaaS) solution. “We can now tailor the data we provide to specific business needs,” explains Marc Baum, Financial Area Coordination Manager at ARAG Spain. “Different teams can get different views on the data, and work on their models and reports independently.”
The company improved international collaboration, too. “We’ve started to work much more closely with our colleagues in different countries,” adds van Meerbeck. “For example, I’ve worked with Marc Baum in Spain on our data models in real time, and together we’ve identified how we could further improve processes. This new way of sharing data will transform the way we work and help us to become an even more data-driven enterprise.”
Decision-makers no longer have to wait for additional documents that need to be created and updated, but instead can work with the latest figures in SAP Analytics Cloud right away.
And thanks to the flexibility of the analytics solution, the central finance team can respond much faster to ad hoc requests for new insights and reports.
CFO & Board Member Group Finance, ARAG Group
Onboarding hundreds of business users and centralizing KPI dashboards
Currently, ARAG is planning its move to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, to continue its standardization and get closer to its vision of fully automated balance sheets for quarterly and annual reports.
In parallel, the team will train more staff in more countries to use SAP Datasphere and bring SAP Analytics Cloud to hundreds of business users. This step will prepare the company to effectively harmonize KPI dashboards with SAP Analytics Cloud.
The rollout of SAP Datasphere will also lay the foundations to focus more on predictive analytics and financial projections. “I’m already looking forward to the point when we can quickly and easily compare the financial performance of different countries with the push of a button,” adds Mathmann.
The solution unlocks new capabilities including easy deployment of machine-learning models with tools such as Python and R in the future. “With more departments seeing what we can do now, I’m sure many teams will be eager to build on the central data platform and experiment with new ideas as well,” confirms Van Meerbeck.
Featured partner
DMA Solutions GmbH is focusing on the latest SAP technology and helps leading businesses to transform and enhance their data analytics with new ideas, streamlined UX, and artificial intelligence.