Maia 1Key provides HDFC Life with option for BI upgrade

In early 2000, HDFC Life perceived that the Cognos tool delivering basic management information systems (MIS) for operational functions fell short of certain requirements. Moreover, the Cognos version was not web-based and was unable to answer queries of the increasing business customers. Thus the company felt the need for an additional BI tool in late 2008.

While not seeking to winnow out Cognos, which would entail unnecessary expense, HDFC Life added an additional tool, Maia 1Key.

Why Maia 1Key

Maia 1Key offers seamless agility to operational managers to monitor productivity in real time, while allowing them to make tactical decisions on resource allocation within the team as well as sharing the resources across zonal teams. Hitherto, decisions were made on reports garnered on backdated information.

Maia 1Key allowed select personnel to slice and dice data and a 1Key Dashboard that offered a single window to view all types of data, facts and figures in multiple ways. The implementation of Six Sigma saw an increase in reporting for the operations team and Maia 1Key fit the bill to monitor departmental reports.

Meanwhile Cognos continues to be used for extracting summary views and help senior management take decisions from the vast data volumes contained in its warehouse. But the real advantage that Maia 1Key offers was the ability to use it on web. Even reporting across different systems was possible by extracting various reports under a single user login.

The project that started in June 2009 went on for two months to develop the initial requirements collected from different departments by two MIS analysts and a developer from Maia Intelligence. The initial plan was to extract various types of reports for one department at a time. The tool was released for identified MIS users after basic training.

“The product had to score high on its ability to reach a large base of users and work on providing summary data for management presentations, thus empowering them to create reports for further analysis.”, says Thomson Thomas, Vice President (Information Technology) at HDFC Life.

The hurdles

Deployment of Maia 1KEY was not altogether smooth. There were issues such as compatibility on upcoming versions of hardware and operating systems.

While the setup is managed by the HDFC development and support team, the initial setup for Maia 1Key and the training was provided by Maia.

The roadmap entails:
• Getting more information for users
• Empower users to do more of analytics than detailing
• Bring in real time information for business agility

The Maia 1Key product was specially purchased for those who seek operational reports to provide it to their management. It helped in reducing the time taken to work upon these reports as it gave summarized reports along with charting options, among other advantages.