The NRMA speeds data and application integration

60%

Reduced Data Ingestion Time

10X

Increase In Productivity

98%

Less Time For Campaign Delivery

Stat Image

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) in Australia offers benefits such as roadside assistance and discounts on travel, dining, entertainment and more to its 2.77 million members. Established in 1920, the NRMA is Australia’s largest member-owned organization.

Interview Transcript
Vamsi Krishna Dhalli:

I'm Vamsi Krishna Dhalli, senior data manager at NRMA. NRMA helps people move around Australia for over a hundred years. It's a membership-based organization. For example, we have parks and resorts, roadside assistance, and also, like six rental car businesses. We have got around 3 million-plus members, meaning we’re serving the need on disparate channels.

So everywhere it's about what is the best personalization you can do for the members to find the value for them. So where data is all siloed and fragmented across the business units, we would like to have a single data platform within NRMA so that we can connect better with our data. We can connect better with our customers and what exactly they're expecting, providing the best number value. Since we are heading towards a single data platform, we decided to have Informatica Data Management Cloud as a data management platform.

What we have decided is, let's start with small, which is cloud data integration, and then we jump onto the cloud application integration and data quality. And also, we are heading towards the metadata management and the rest as well.

So right now, we are building a customer 360 using the data quality engine behind the scenes and also building some customer applications based on the needs of the data strategy. Informatica, first of all, it has got built-in connectors to Google out of the box, Google BigQuery, easily connectable. So, all we need to do is to set up the simple configuration steps and off you go.

You should be able to build any kind of mappings or mapping templates. If you have to build any recommendation AI modules, how exactly that can play with. And also, we were sharing the same information to our end marketing channels. It used to be 10 days; we brought it down to 30 minutes.

We are still five people, but still we are doing an enormous amount of work. Just roughly like, you know, on a yearly basis, we are running one million worth of pipelines. Productivity rate has grown tremendously. It's all getting automated. We are no longer siloed management, tool or the orchestration framework. It's all sitting at one place where we will be able to see all the operating information of all the loads and the pipelines at one place. That's how exactly Informatica is taking us forward.

“Our goal is to make the most of our data to drive the journey for our members. With a clearer picture of what our data is telling us, we can grow memberships, meet business outcomes and meet our members’ needs. With Informatica, we can now promote data-driven journeys across NRMA.”

Vamsi Krishna Dhalli

Senior Data Manager
Pioneering an efficient cloud data warehouse modernization

A personal touch for 2.77 million members

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) is the largest member-owned organization in Australia. Benefits include its award-winning roadside assistance, tourism and thousands of discounts on everything from fuel and groceries to travel and theme parks.

NRMA aims to help members get the most out of their benefits by promoting partner organizations. With hundreds of diverse offers available at any time, personalization is an important way of making sure members see the benefits that interest them across web, mobile app or email.

And to achieve the desired level of personalization, all the NRMA teams need access to the same data from a reliable, central source.

“Data is everything within NRMA,” says Vamsi Krishna Dhalli, Senior Data Manager, at NRMA. “Our data consolidation initiative comes from our desire to better meet our members’ needs. We need to listen closely to what our members are telling us and provide just the right information when they need it.”

The NRMA developed a very disparate and siloed data environment over the years. The organization embarked on a single data platform strategy to consolidate all data on Google Cloud. By adopting Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), the NRMA now manages all data in centralized data warehouses and data lakes while improving data quality and automating workflows for greater productivity across teams.

“Connecting IDMC with Google Cloud was so easy. All we needed to do was set up the simple configuration steps and off it went. IDMC lets us easily create mapping templates without coding, so we can quickly start ingesting data from a wide variety of sources and have the data pipelines work seamlessly. We reduced data ingestions and transformation times by 60%.”

Vamsi Krishna Dhalli

Senior Data Manager

Accelerating data integration

All these disparate data sources are now reliably brought into Google Cloud using IDMC. Out-of-the-box connectors allow NRMA to automatically ingest data from more than 150 partner files and third-party applications every day.

Before adopting IDMC, NRMA teams worked with more than 3,000 data integration pipelines, some of which extracted the same data multiple times. Data came from numerous sources, including multiple CRM environments, financial tools and marketing solutions. Due to the complexity of the environments, teams relied on developers to write the code needed for each new data pipeline.

Modernizing to the Cloud in 6 months at nearly half the cost

Cloud Data Integration within IDMC dynamically generates mapping tasks and loads data into Google Cloud, where it instantly becomes available for analysis using Google BigQuery. With Cloud Data Quality, rule templates automate data validation and verification without the need for manual coding.

“Connecting IDMC with Google Cloud was so easy,” says Dhalli. “All we needed to do was set up the simple configuration steps and off it went. IDMC lets us easily create mapping templates without coding, so we can quickly start ingesting data from a wide variety of sources and have the data pipelines work seamlessly. We reduced data ingestions and transformation times by 60%.”

Creating opportunities for innovation in the cloud

Driving productivity with low-code, real-time application integration and process automation

IDMC's Cloud Application Integration with its low-code/no-code approach empowers teams at NRMA to effortlessly create automated workflows through an intuitive process designer. It makes it easy to connect applications in real time, allowing teams to create automated workflows that increase productivity tenfold.

Cloud Application Integration facilitated a self-serve campaign launch for digital marketing on social platforms such as Facebook and Google Ads. This integration automated third-party B2B partner and B2C-based integrations and integrated with Oracle Responsys for multi-channel marketing. To achieve this, out-of-the-box connectors were deployed or custom connectors were swiftly built using Cloud Application Integration.

Additionally, Cloud Application Integration played a crucial role in triggering campaigns based on requested schedules. As a result of this streamlined process, the time taken for campaign delivery was drastically reduced from three days to just 30 minutes, all without the need for technical teams.

One of the biggest benefits of simple, automated workflows is the increase in self-service across the NRMA. Using drag-and-drop UI and simple operations, teams companywide can access the analytics and build the reports they need. Reporting commission-based performance, for example, was simplified by 50%, enabling the NRMA to check performance as needed by allowing self-serve capabilities for metric creation based on predefined rules.

The campaign intelligence team analyzes member data closely to understand what members want. It then uses these insights to create personalized campaigns to help members find offers and services they’ll appreciate. Previously, it could take at least three days to analyze member data, find specific audiences and roll out a personalized campaign—a delay that could mean offers were no longer relevant to members. With the modern data platform, it takes the team just 30 minutes.

“The campaign intelligence team can run pipelines whenever needed to get the information they need to launch effective campaigns directly at customers or provide that insight to partners,” says Dhalli. “With fewer delays, members see more offers that pique their interest, which improves member experiences while also driving more traffic to partners.”

Bringing member data to life

The NRMA plans to continue expanding its IDMC footprint to unlock the power of its data and provide even better personalization for its members, using master data management for a 360-degree view of customers.

“Our goal is to make the most of our data to drive the journey for our members,” says Dhalli. “With a clearer picture of what our data is telling us, we can grow memberships, meet business outcomes and meet our members’ needs. With Informatica, we can now promote data-driven journeys across NRMA.”

Increasing cloud data availability for anytime access

Inside the solution

Cloud Data Integration

Realize automated, high-performance, multi-cloud data integration at scale.
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Cloud Data Quality

Informatica data quality and observability ensures trusted, scalable data.
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Cloud Application Integration

Integrate apps and data in real time with intelligent business processes spanning cloud and on-premises sources.
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