The Challenge: A Platform That Couldn’t Stand Still
A live Data Warehouse under constant pressure to change — without ever breaking what already worked.
The client’s Data Warehouse — built on Microsoft SQL Server, fed via linked servers and SSIS, and reported on through SSIS and SSRS — was the established backbone for Risk, Underwriting, and cross-departmental reporting. It worked, but it needed to be adapted continuously: new business requirements, integration projects, and operational changes kept arriving, and every one of them had to be absorbed without affecting existing processes or reporting.
Complicating things further, the Warehouse sat at the center of a genuinely complex web — tables, views, stored procedures, ETL jobs, reports, and cross-application dependencies, much of it only partially documented. Understanding the downstream impact of any single change often meant reverse-engineering logic no one had fully mapped before.
“Our Data Warehouse couldn’t afford downtime — Risk and Underwriting were pulling from it every day. Every new integration or business rule felt like changing an engine while the plane was still flying. We needed a team that understood that risk, not one that treated it as just another ticket.”
— IT Program Director, Client Organization
The Discovery: Becoming Part of the Client’s Team
Not a vendor on a ticket queue — an embedded team trusted with the Group’s own change process.
Rather than a single onboarding moment, the relationship grew into a standing extension of the client’s team. IDS took on Project Manager, Business Analyst, and developer roles embedded directly in the client’s Group-driven change process, becoming the team trusted to translate incoming business and regulatory requirements into safe, tested changes to the platform.
The Solution: 100+ Initiatives, One Flagship Integration
From everyday change requests to a real-time credit limit sync between two live systems.
Over the course of the engagement, IDS analyzed and implemented more than 100 business initiatives — new data flows, reporting changes, and application integrations — all on the client’s existing SQL Server / SSIS / SSRS platform, using GitLab, Jira, Confluence, and Excel to manage delivery and change control.
The flagship initiative was building a credit limit administration mechanism with real-time synchronization between two operational applications hosted on separate servers, while the Data Warehouse continued its daily load cycle for historization and reporting, uninterrupted. This meant designing integration logic that respected both the real-time needs of the operational side and the batch-driven reliability the Warehouse required.
The Battle: Reverse-Engineering a System Without a Map
Incomplete documentation and no dedicated QA meant every assumption had to be tested — and owned — by IDS.
Delivering change inside a live, business-critical platform came with real friction. Documentation gaps meant the team frequently had to reverse-engineer existing logic — tracing tables, views, procedures, and ETL jobs to understand true dependencies before touching anything.
With no dedicated QA function on the client side, IDS consultants stayed involved through final validation themselves, owning quality end-to-end rather than handing off and hoping.
The Results: From Manual and Error-Prone to Automated and Trusted
Hard numbers behind three-plus years of continuous delivery.
- 100+ business initiatives. Analyzed and implemented without disrupting existing reporting or operations.
- Manual calculation automated. The credit limit project replaced a manual, error-prone daily calculation with an automated one, freeing up significant user time.
- New daily reporting automated. A previously manual reporting step now runs automatically, every day.
- Reduced process runtime. Optimization work cut overall running time across key data flows.
- Stronger data consistency. Across the applications and reports that Risk, Underwriting, and management rely on for daily decisions.
“What used to be a manual, error-prone calculation every day is now automated and something we simply trust. IDS didn’t just deliver the integration — they stayed on until we could validate it ourselves, which mattered a lot given we don’t have a dedicated QA team on our side. They act like part of our team, not a vendor ticking off a project.”
— Head of Risk Technology, Client Organization