WoodmenLife Removes Bottlenecks and Increases Productivity with Alation

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 20, 2023 – Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, announced that not-for-profit life insurance provider, WoodmenLife, leverages Alation’s data intelligence platform to increase productivity. With Alation, WoodmenLife’s data and business analysts govern and manage data as a strategic asset, modernize the organization’s technology stack, and migrate critical data to the cloud. Prior to Alation, workflows that took 3 – 5 days on average now run in 15 minutes, increasing productivity by nearly 99%. 

The Omaha-based life insurance and retirement benefits provider has been serving customers for over 130 years, producing thousands of data points each year. The organization hosts a myriad of legacy technologies and applications within its technology stack and needed a solution that enabled users to find and surface high-quality and trusted data quickly. Without the ability to access and understand the data within the organization, the company lacked the resources to effectively and securely migrate to the cloud.

Alation Data Intelligence Platform provides visibility into WoodmenLife’s complex data ecosystem. Now, data users, both business-focused and technical, can find, understand, and govern data to make business decisions based on trusted insights. WoodmenLife uses Alation to understand and un-do “bad habits” that exist around their data landscape to modernize and move forward with new capabilities. As a result, WoodmenLife has discovered new ways to re-engineer old processes.

WoodmenLife has monthly data workflows that take up to five days to complete. After re-structuring the process and running in a more modern technology stack, users are able to run workflows in 15 minutes, start to finish. The company is only beginning to tap into its potential for optimization, as they scale the use of Alation across the organization to enable more users to discover ways to enhance processes they run regularly. Additionally, the company is leveraging Alation Cloud Service to migrate data to the cloud and reimagine its technology stack, which is driving WoodmenLife’s data-led transformation. 

Now the company operates with data at the helm, empowering teams to make data-informed business decisions and deliver innovation that improves the customer experience based on trusted analysis of millions of data points. Leveraging Alation, IT teams can plan and prioritize what data to migrate to the cloud by identifying the most used and unused data, rather than take a lift and shift approach. This powerful insight lays the foundation for its cloud migration, the last step in the organization’s journey to modernize its technology stack. 

“For the first time, we are getting a clear understanding of our data landscape thanks to Alation,” said Kam Rokon, Data Officer at WoodmenLife. “The Alation data intelligence platform is the foundation of our technology stack, allowing us to unlock new insights and unearth and address previously hidden bottlenecks. Processes that once took days are now completed in minutes and cumbersome projects, such as forecasting actuaries and understanding current and potential risk, are made simple.” 

“WoodmenLife is a model example of how to simplify a highly complex data landscape and effectively migrate to the cloud,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder at Alation. “We look forward to a continued partnership, helping WoodmenLife create value from analytics and supporting its digital transformation into an agile, data-centric organization.”  

WoodmenLife will discuss its data-driven transformation and cloud migration that is led by Alation at the upcoming Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida, scheduled for March 20-22, 2023.   

Join Sanjeev Mohan, analytics expert at Gartner, Kam Rokon, Data Officer at WoodmenLife, and Mitesh Shah, VP of Product Marketing at Alation, for a fireside chat titled “Use Your Cloud Migration to Supercharge Data Governance.” Scheduled for March 20 at 4 p.m. EDT, the discussion will explore how data leaders can leverage cloud migration to change the conversation around the data environment – shifting data governance from a blocker to an enabler.

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