NLC Mutual relied for years on a claims and underwriting system written in the 1980s. The company that wrote it has terminated support, and the NLC employee who used it has retired, so we contracted with a development company to write a new one for us.  Building a new system rather than purchasing one is a difficult decision, so we needed to be able to monitor our spending to show our board that it was a smart financial decision.

Use case

We decided to manage the budget by consolidating all the project invoices we receive from the vendor into Domo and comparing the aggregated amount against our initial budget forecast. That lets us automate the first part of the review process, so we can catch and correct any errors in a timely fashion. More importantly, it lets us adapt the project to our budget on the fly. If our analysis shows we’re running over budget, we can dial back some of the nice-to-have project specifications and still end up with solid functionality. If, on the other hand, we’re running under budget, we can add some of those wish list specifications back into the project.

Conclusion

Domo helped us keep track of our software development vendor’s performance to budget on this project, so we’re getting all the value we budgeted for without any embarrassing upcharges. And because we’re using Domo as the report engine for our new claims and underwriting system, we were able to reallocate development resources to other parts of the project. In a data-driven business like ours, Domo’s flexibility has been a real value contributor.