Transamerica’s Enterprise Marketing and Analytics Platform (EMAP) project was launched to provide a complete view and understanding of all customer (approximately 20 million) - and prospective customer - relationships across Transamerica’s operations. As a result of legacy acquisitions over the years, Transamerica operations were hampered by data growth, fragmented data and siloed data warehouse environments – resulting in an incomplete view of customer circumstances and need, as well as exacerbating lengthy time-to-insights. Consequently, in 2015, a large-scale collaborative effort was launched, starting with representatives from the company’s IT, marketing and business intelligence communities. This partnership has set the tone for a new approach to collaboration within the company and data utilization, while also being an essential factor in the EMAP project’s success. EMAP utilizes a Hadoop-based “data lake” which pools customer-oriented data from across the enterprise and makes it available for strategic planning, operational analytics, marketing analytics, predictive modeling, business intelligence and other use cases. The core technologies underlying EMAP include big data processing on Cloudera Hadoop and Informatica data management. Transamerica has high ROI expectations from the EMAP project given its early successes. Much of this ROI is in the form of increased productivity and more rapid time-to-insight. In addition to delivering productivity boosts and cost savings, EMAP is used to perform work that simply was not possible in any form previously.
