DELA stands for “Draagt Elkanders Lasten” (Carry Each Other’s Burdens) and is part of a cooperative. DELA specializes in all aspects related to farewells, providing support to people during one of the most challenging times in their lives: the farewell of a loved one. Our organization has been around for over 85 years and has been present in Belgium since 1989, where it employs nearly 800 staff members who assist before, during, and after a funeral. DELA is best known as a funeral insurer but also operates around 70 highly qualified funeral homes across more than 120 locations in Belgium, three crematoria, and a repatriation center at Zaventem airport. Additionally, around 30 bereavement care consultants are available daily to help relatives with practical and administrative tasks after the funeral. DELA handles approximately 80% of repatriations and buries 1 in 10 Belgians. DELA is thus recognized as the funeral specialist of Belgium. In line with its social commitment, DELA established the DELAfonds, which supports initiatives aimed at making the difficult moments surrounding farewells more bearable.
Our assistance was requested for a large data migration process at the Belgian Insurance branch. The goal: to migrate the various custom CRM packages to the new CRM system on Microsoft D365, while also achieving backpropagation between the new CRM system and the existing systems.
The data to be migrated includes contacts, policies, brokers… Such a large-scale migration involves many internal and external stakeholders and technical profiles.
Our role consisted of improving data quality and making the data compliant with the requirements for the data migration. This involved data cleaning, deduplication, and mapping.
The figure below explains our role in the data migration process::
The advantage of a data migration is that all information (policy, person, broker, etc.) can be consulted and modified in one system: Microsoft Dynamics D365. This makes it easier to work with the data and obtain insights from it more smoothly. Moreover, data quality has been increased, making the data more accurate.
Cloubis acted as a bridge between the technical stakeholders and the business stakeholders regarding data decisions and data issues. Not only were we involved in the analysis and stakeholder management, we were also at the wheel of implementing all this logic. For both tasks, we mainly worked with Tableau and Tableau Prep. In data cleansing, python algorithms were also designed to e.g. change a misspelled address to the correct address and to determine the language of an address. Data enrichment was also done by linking external sources.Because a project of this size involves working with diverse teams and stakeholders, communication was essential. It was of utmost importance to document our actions sufficiently so that it was clear to every party involved what was happening with the data. Regularly, stakeholder decisions were needed on how to address a particular issue. In that case, it was important to present the issue concisely, specifically and concretely to the stakeholders in question. Quantification and sufficient examples from the data were provided to make the problem and the consequences of different possible solutions clear.
