How MDS Group took Qlik Sense to the whole company and multiplied usage by 400%

MDS is a multinational insurance broker and risk manager, market leader in Portugal, with operations in Angola and Mozambique and a place among the three largest brokers in the Brazilian market, where it gathers more than seven hundred employees across fifteen offices, and it is part of Brokerslink, a network that opens access to business in more than one hundred and twenty countries. The group became part of the Ardonagh Group, one of the twenty largest brokers in the world, a move that once again widened the population of users the intelligence team has to serve.

The person responsible for that team is Erick Hoepfner, business intelligence superintendent, and the way he describes his own work already anticipates the problem MDS needed to solve, because he refuses to treat business intelligence as a synonym for dashboards and understands the discipline as the whole chain that runs from understanding what the business area needs to distributing the information and keeping it alive.

The MDS intelligence team went through a consolidation effort in which applications spread across different platforms were brought under a single responsibility: being the team that validates and distributes the company's numbers. The number of applications grew fast, and with it came the gap between publishing a dashboard and that dashboard actually being used, because business employees received long links by email or message and kept those links in a spreadsheet or a personal notes file, which made company information depend on each person's private file. A good share of the consumption, on top of that, was not the dashboard itself, since many people open the application only to generate an on-demand report in Excel, PDF or PowerPoint.

What was missing was a single place, with the MDS look, where every employee would find what concerns their work without having to know where to look, and that place had to respect without exception the access rules already in place, because no solution that required recreating security in parallel would have been acceptable.

When he approached Cluster, Erick brought five requirements framed in very concrete terms: organize the content, don't lose the security parameters of the environment, be easy, fast and intuitive for the end user, have a cost that works for a large base of people, and allow visual customization.

NewHub came in as the consumption layer on top of the Qlik environment MDS already had, replacing nothing and without requiring the analytics team to change how they work, and it became the entry point for everyone else. Navigation was organized into groups and subgroups that mirror the company's real operation, separating Brazil and Portugal and then breaking down by business area, so an employee comes in through a single address and finds what is theirs.

Two fronts widened the scope beyond what was planned at the start. The first was publishing content that isn't a dashboard: the market studies the team produces as PDFs moved inside the portal, and the finance team took the same route, dropping the distribution of statements and spreadsheets by attachment and shared folder and publishing in NewHub instead, where the intelligence team applies the rules of who sees what. The second was the home page with indicators, which shows at each login only the cards that person has access to, bringing target, revenue, premium and the month's position onto the very first screen, without requiring the user to open dashboard after dashboard to find out whether they need to act.

One decision MDS took against the grain is worth recording, because it demonstrates the tool's flexibility better than any description would. The team chose not to use the Cluster Skin and developed a theme of their own in CSS and JSON, preserving the native behaviour of the filters as a matter of internal analytical culture, and NewHub accommodated that choice with a configuration change.