What Allstate Wanted:
Visibility into travel data and into data from outside the travel sphere
How It Went About It:
Partnering with Travel and Transport as it spun off and is developing Big Data
subsidiary Data Visualization Intelligence
What Allstate Got Out of It:
Consolidation of travel, expense and payment data, along with external data
sources like weather so it can monitor and predict impacts on travel and on company
operations
When Travel and Transport spun off Big Data subsidiary Data
Visualization Intelligence in the summer of 2016, Allstate already had worked
with the travel management company on its data project for a year and a half.
DVI's Vantage Point tool will debut this year.
In addition to the travel data T&T already had on
Allstate, the largest publicly held personal insurer in the United States also
has been feeding DVI payment data, invoices and other data, director of
enterprise travel Duane Goucher said. T&T is normalizing all of that data,
and Goucher expects a first look at the Vantage Point dashboard in the coming
weeks. "We will be able to have a dynamic view in real time, with the data
points changing before your eyes as you move the sliders," he said. "From
there, you can export it to PowerPoint slides or whatever format you're going
to use it for, tailored for the audience you are presenting to."
After the first quarter of use, Allstate should have
stability with the data, and eventually it all will come through secure feeds,
requiring nothing to be sent manually. From there, the company can set DVI up
to shoot out reports on a schedule, as well as on demand, Goucher said.
Allstate required that the dashboard be both flexible and
intuitive, Goucher said. Different users—the CFO versus a manager, for
example—each should be able to see the data points that are most relevant to
him or her, and they should be able to figure out how to do so with little
instruction, he said.
Allstate expects the tool to improve compliance by, for
example, enabling the company to see when travelers are not booking their
hotels through agency channels and to see if an employee buys prohibited items
like gift cards, he said. "For the most part, everybody wants to do the
right thing, but over the years, they may not know what has changed or that
they were supposed to do it this way. It will identify where we need to focus
on educating and taking people on the journey."
The insight also will help Allstate ensure it is complying
with regulations and taxation on purchases, and it also will benefit the
company's negotiations with detailed airline ancillary spending data, he said. "That
won't likely change much from the pricing perspective, but it does give you
different leverage over the course of the year, especially as Level 3 data
becomes more prevalent."
Initially, Allstate will focus on the United States, but it
could lasso in India, Canada and Northern Ireland, Goucher said.
Once the travel piece is in place, Allstate will broaden its
data feeds to include some from outside the travel program like weather or the
Consumer Price Index. With all that data in one place, the company can get a
full view of the ways incidents affect the whole business, not just travel.
Allstate then can apply predictive analysis to its operations.
Allstate's finance side, meanwhile, is building
a data and dashboard tool for internal use. Vantage Point will be one of
sources that feeds data into that tool. "You could instantly see, say,
that you had 70 inches of snowfall in Chicago across 60 days in 2015 and tie it
back with the Consumer Price Index to see that the cost of plywood went up,
with all the things we have to fix and repair," Goucher said. "It's
truly the differentiator because right now there's not a relationship between
all those data points. That's the exciting stuff: providing it and keeping it
so simple that any employee with permissions can log into this and get a quick
view of what's going on."