Generali Brasil modernizes back-office operations with Google Cloud and SAP
About Generali Brasil
Generali is one of the largest global insurance and asset management groups. Established in 1831, it is present in 50 countries in the world, with a total premium income of over €75.8 billion in 2021. With almost 72,000 employees serving 67 million customers, the group has a leading position in Europe and a growing presence in Asia and Latin America. Generali Group aims to be its customers’ lifelong partner, offering innovative and personalized solutions thanks to an extensive distribution network.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Deloitte
Deloitte is the world’s largest professional services organization, present in 150 countries. It provides enterprise consultancy, risk advisory, tax consultancy, financial advisory, and audit services. Deloitte was named Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for four consecutive years.
By implementing S/4HANA in Google Cloud with support from Deloitte, the company achieved positive changes in its internal processes and started planning to add more cloud solutions.
Google Cloud results
- Increased agility with remote system access through apps.
- Increased team productivity.
- Process automation and streamlining.
- Scalability and ability to monitor.
Greater governance, with centralization of information
Focused on mass-market insurance, group life insurance, and high risks, Generali Brasil is part of one of Europe’s largest insurance groups, Grupo Generali, present in around 50 countries with over 72,000 employees.
As Generali Brasil implemented a deep digital-transformation process begun by Grupo Generali worldwide, it also started looking for solutions with better technology-usage practices. That is how major changes began taking place in the company.
One challenge was modernizing back-office processes. The company needed to ensure integration, standardization, streamlining, and agility. For that reason the tech team decided to centralize those processes into a single SAP system, S/4HANA.
"We used to have a back-office environment with solutions that were not interconnected. That’s why we urgently needed continuity, leaving no room for mistakes. With that goal in mind, we viewed SAP, and particularly S/4HANA, as the chance to access an end-to-end process."
—Adriana Marques Menezes, IT Superintendent, Generali BrasilIn mid-2019, the team was looking for a company to support its S/4HANA deployment. During talks, one proposal stood out: Deloitte’s. The consultancy firm also proposed using Google Cloud solutions to store the new environment.
"For such a large project, we need to align every aspect: tech, processes, and people (the team). Having partners to support us with knowledge about the cloud, the tech environment, processes, and systemic integrations is essential," explains Adriana Menezes. "Besides our in-house team, we surrounded ourselves with partners such as Deloitte and Google Cloud, who contributed to this project’s success."
Basically, the process was approved by the company’s Italian headquarters and performed by its Brazilian teams. Generali wanted to deploy tools that could drive integration between the different platforms the organization uses.
New directions and remote migration
Deploying in Google Cloud entailed a few challenges that were noticeable from the get-go. One of them concerned how to approach SAP, as Generali wanted to extract everything that it could leverage based on the company’s reality.
Moreover, having remote, easier access through apps was essential. Other goals were integrating and standardizing every process and expanding the scope of automation and innovation.
The project began in March 2020 and was performed remotely, with many professionals working in constant communication to find the best way forward.
Deloitte worked on the integration required, centralizing every process in S/4HANA with storage in Google Cloud. This provided the sustainability the company needed to develop its internal activities. Hybrid project-management and proprietary methodologies were applied as accelerators during this phase.
“When I found out about Generali’s proposal and the digital transformation the company set out to do, I realized this was a combination of efforts to completely transform the company’s outlook. We understood that several tools would be deployed simultaneously, in other areas.”
—Jorge Costa, partner, Deloitte’s Enterprise Technology & Performance practiceAfter deploying the project, they began running back-office routines and the operational area’s accounting interfaces on S/4HANA. The updating of tech assets, the robustness, the high availability and the new environment’s scalable computing power in Google Cloud made a difference.
"It was a quantum leap tech-wise because we improved our infrastructure with Google Cloud, ensuring security and agility. Moreover, everything was done in compliance with Generali’s standards," adds John Sá, Generali Brasil’s Infrastructure and Security Manager.
Results that benefit operations
Using S/4HANA and the environment provided by Google Cloud ensured compliance in audit and data reliability matters. Generali further increased its productivity for back-office activities, offering the system’s users access through apps.
"Agility for closing, which now happens every day, and data reliability ensured by integration are factors that make work simpler. Today, information is clear and available to all users," explains Jorge Costa.
Other benefits include process automation, improved governance through a single source of truth, flexibility, and scalability thanks to cloud resources and the ability to monitor.
Interestingly, thanks to S/4HANA, several projects were accelerated. In the past, users manually created different loads, which exposed them to potential mistakes. The new environment helped improve that activity.
"An essential highlight was the change in company culture, which had the most impact. Tech is about adaptation, but the culture depends on many people choosing and embracing that concept, involving a different way of thinking and working. We achieved that and the benefits were huge."
—Paulo José Azevedo Sallorenzo, Senior IT Coordinator, Generali BrasilThe team is currently working on maturing the system. The company’s goal is to stabilize the SAP platform, a task that is already underway. Generali aims to improve user training with the help of functional analysts so the system can be used more confidently.
“We also want to converge as many systems and apps as we can in Google Cloud, entering through BI, BigQuery, and Looker Studio. And we intend to use Apigee more intensely, as well as data analytics, which we will explore more exponentially,” says John Sá.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Generali Brasil
Generali is one of the largest global insurance and asset management groups. Established in 1831, it is present in 50 countries in the world, with a total premium income of over €75.8 billion in 2021. With almost 72,000 employees serving 67 million customers, the group has a leading position in Europe and a growing presence in Asia and Latin America. Generali Group aims to be its customers’ lifelong partner, offering innovative and personalized solutions thanks to an extensive distribution network.
About Deloitte
Deloitte is the world’s largest professional services organization, present in 150 countries. It provides enterprise consultancy, risk advisory, tax consultancy, financial advisory, and audit services. Deloitte was named Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for four consecutive years.