Enables personalized, self-service BI for customers
Accelerates in-house BI creation to minutes versus months
Facilitates consistent BI experiences
Reduces time-consuming, manual BI workflows
Shifts focus from silo maintenance to innovation
Applied Systems is building a unified data and BI platform with BigQuery and Looker that will provide customers with personalized, self-service insights across its product portfolio, starting with Applied Epic.
Applied Systems is building a unified data and BI platform with BigQuery and Looker that will provide customers with personalized, self-service insights across its product portfolio, starting with Applied Epic.
Addressing data and BI silos to improve services and innovation
For decades, Applied Systems has helped global insurance agencies and brokerages digitize workflows, make data-driven business decisions, and deliver responsive client services with a growing portfolio of products. However, after years of rapid growth and acquisitions, Applied Systems faced technology silo issues. Products had their own data stores and models, and for BI capabilities, they used either Applied Systems' custom BI app or third-party technologies such as Tableau and Power BI. The data silos made it difficult for customers to gain a comprehensive view of their clients and markets, and the different BI solutions created disjointed user experiences.
Additionally, Applied Systems was spending considerable time maintaining its custom BI app. It was difficult to find employees who had the skills to work on it. And there was no way for insurance agencies and brokerages to automatically generate their own custom reports, including those populated with only the data each employee was authorized to access. As a result, customers were using spreadsheets to manually combine and analyze data to create different versions of reports for their teams. "We had multiple BI tools and none of them could enforce user-level security in a scalable way," explains Marina Mats, Vice President of Data Analytics at Applied Systems. "Every report had to be manually built and redistributed by administrators just to ensure the right people saw the right data. It created bottlenecks, introduced risk, and completely broke the idea of operational self-service."
Standardizing on Google Cloud
To provide customers with seamless, modern BI experiences, Applied Systems decided to begin the unification of its data silos by establishing one data lake and standardizing on one third-party BI solution to eventually embed in all its products. That way, it could focus its resources on advancing innovation rather than maintaining siloed, product-specific BI and data solutions. After an extensive evaluation process, Applied Systems decided to build its centralized data and BI solution with Google Cloud because BigQuery and Looker Embedded deliver the capabilities required to meet its immediate and long-term requirements.
BigQuery serves as the backbone for all our operational, financial, and insurance policy data — at scale and with real-time performance. Looker lets us seamlessly embed governed, interactive insights directly into our products, eliminating context-switching and giving users answers where they work, not in a separate tool.
Marina Mats
Vice President, Data Analytics, Applied Systems
Establishing one data layer to increase usage and controls
Applied Systems started with its unified data foundation. "We focused first on building a data lake in BigQuery to enable fast and efficient movement of data from our customer-facing systems into a unified, scalable warehouse. This gave us a high-performance foundation to support downstream analytics, governance, and user-facing insights as we began layering in Looker," Mats says.
To maximize data insights and controls, engineers built a semantic layer using the Looker modeling language, LookML. The models in the semantic layer establish standardized descriptions of every data dimension as well as consistent KPI calculations, data maps, and persona-based governance controls that stipulate which employee roles can access what data. By establishing consistent data definitions, customers can easily connect the dots between the data they generate and manage with Applied Systems' products. The persona-based approach also ensures consistent access controls based on industry best practices for standard roles such as service manager, accountant, IT administrator, and insurance agency and brokerage owner.
Building a dashboard app with Embedded Looker
With Looker Explores, users without technical backgrounds can instantly build and tailor reports on their own — with no IT ticket and no waiting. This level of self-service has transformed BI from a bottleneck into a daily workflow accelerator.
Marina Mats
Vice President, Data Analytics, Applied Systems
With the structure of its unified, governed data platform in place, Applied Systems began the next phase of its vision: replacing its custom BI tools with an embeddable dashboard app powered by Looker. For the app's initial use case, engineers built and embedded the app in the company's core product, Applied Epic®, which is an insurance agency and brokerage management system. The Looker app includes more than 100 dashboards that are customized for seven different user personas. "Every dashboard is purpose-built around the user's role — whether it's an owner tracking growth, a customer service representative monitoring renewals, or a producer watching their pipeline," says Mats. "These embedded views feel like a natural extension of the platform, not an add-on."
Engineers made the new Looker dashboard app look like the existing Applied Epic interface by embedding the app in the product's veneer layer, developed with standard web application tools. They also added a new folder management tool in the veneer layer using the Looker API that enables administrators to organize dashboards for themselves and for their teams. This was a critical requirement since the legacy BI solution in Applied Epic did not support folders, while the rest of Applied Epic did.
Mats says, "We extended Looker's embedded experience with custom folder tools that mirror how users already organize their work. With simple drag-and-drop tools, admins can group dashboards, manage permissions, and align insights with business workflows — all without code."
Applied Systems used out-of-the-box Looker capabilities to add new self-service BI customization options to the dashboard app as well. As a result, customers' administrators can explore the data they're authorized to access in the data lake and create custom dashboards and reports for themselves and other employees at their insurance agency and brokerage using Looker Explores. Any Applied Epic user can also set alerts so they're notified when a condition is met like when a KPI value in a dashboard exceeds a specific number or a task remains open for a set number of days.
Ensuring consistent user insights
The centralized, persona-based data and BI solution that Applied Systems built with BigQuery and Looker automates BI tasks for customers and Applied Systems' teams — and it ensures changes are made consistently. For example, if an Applied Systems employee changes a Looker Explore or a data definition in the semantic layer, that change is automatically reflected across all dashboards for Applied Epic users.
Instead of updating hundreds of reports individually, we now modify a metric once in LookML, and it propagates instantly across every dashboard and Explore. This model eliminates inconsistency and ensures that our definitions stay aligned across all dashboards.
Marina Mats
Vice President, Data Analytics, Applied Systems
Innovating faster
Since it adopted Looker, Applied Systems' teams are more productive. "It used to take months of effort to add BI capabilities to a product," says Mats. "Now it takes minutes to create a dashboard or a report. As a result, we've built at least 10 times more BI content in a shorter period of time with Looker compared to our previous tools."
Applied Systems is now integrating its unified data and BI platform with a newly acquired offering called Applied Book Builder. By doing so, Applied Systems will be able to provide customers with persona-based insights into risk profile data, coverage gaps, and cross sell and upsell opportunities based on AI-powered analysis of in-house data and thousands of publicly available sources. "Instead of custom building a BI feature or spinning up a new data and BI stack for Applied Book Builder, we're leveraging the solution we built with BigQuery and Looker. This helps us move faster because we're not reinventing the wheel — and our customers get a consistent experience."
Speed and agility have been our biggest wins. By standardizing on BigQuery and Looker for our BI platform, we can move so much faster — and rapidly adapt our offerings to keep up with market changes.
Marina Mats
Vice President, Data Analytics, Applied Systems
Company engineers are also exploring use cases for adding other Looker capabilities to the dashboard app such as Gemini in Looker, which can support natural language BI queries. "We're exploring how Gemini in Looker will enable users to ask complex business questions conversationally, so they can obtain the insights they seek without needing to know SQL or dimensions," says Mats. "It's the next leap in democratizing data and analytics across our user base."
Applied Systems is the world's largest provider of cloud-based insurance brokerage management software. The insurance automation and innovation leader serves customers throughout the US, Canada, Ireland, and the UK.
Industry: Technology
Location: United States
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Looker Embedded
