Introduction
Ethias is one of Belgium’s leading insurers, serving over a million customers across private and public sectors. To consolidate four legacy Oracle Exadata warehouses and speed delivery, Ethias partnered with NRB and adopted WhereScape automation. The result: daily (and faster) data refreshes, rapid team scale, and a Data Vault foundation built for change.
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- Manual ETL bottlenecks: Hand-coded pipelines slowed delivery and limited how quickly new staff could contribute.
- Infrequent loads: Weekly refreshes left finance month-end close out of sync and data not always fit for purpose.
- Fragmented warehouses: Four legacy Oracle Exadata environments increased maintenance and blocked consolidation.
- Scaling constraints: Specialist coding skills made it hard to grow the team quickly and cost-effectively.
- Confidence at risk: Long implementation cycles eroded stakeholder trust and delayed visible value.
“WhereScape enables us to work a lot faster. With other tools, we lost the client during the implementation part. If you want a new car, you want it in two weeks, not two months. Before it took months; the customer is waiting, and you lose their confidence. Now we can keep confidence all the way. It’s a good combination – Agile, close to the customer, and the tool can keep going.”
– Jonathan Drèze, Ethias’s Project Manager at NRB
Why WhereScape?
Ethias and NRB selected WhereScape to automate Data Vault modeling, generate native Oracle code, and standardize patterns end-to-end. WhereScape 3D accelerates design and prototyping; WhereScape RED automates ELT/ETL, metadata management, and documentation. The platform reduces manual coding risk, improves governance, and shortens time-to-value for analytics and reporting.
The Solution
Proof of Value First
A one-year program delivered two projects with a two-person team, proving speed and reliability and unlocking the wider modernization—decommissioning multiple legacy warehouses.
Adopt Data Vault Automation
The team moved to Data Vault for a resilient, auditable history. WhereScape automated hash keys, patterns, and inter-dependencies, eliminating repetitive hand coding and lowering maintenance as the platform scaled.
Design Fast With 3D
Architects used WhereScape 3D templates to model complex sources quickly, compare and merge changes, and socialize prototypes with the business before locking scope.
Build and Orchestrate in RED
Developers used WhereScape RED to drag-and-drop mappings and generate thousands of lines of native Oracle code in seconds, with repeatable jobs and automated documentation for governance.
CDC and Near Real-Time
Introducing CDC on the IBM mainframe moved the cadence beyond weekly batch. Critical processes—especially month-end close—now run on daily loads with the option to go nearer to real time.
“After one year, we delivered both projects, so it was a success. After this confirmation, we decided to go for the full scope of the project – the decommissioning of the legacy data warehouse.”
– Jonathan Drèze, Ethias’s Project Manager at NRB
Results
🚀 Faster Delivery Cadence
- Weekly → daily loads for month-end finance processes.
- CDC on the mainframe enables near real-time ingestion.
- Prototypes validated early reduce rework and cycle time.
🚀 Team Scale and Skills
- Team grew from 4 → 18 in one year; 15 daily WhereScape users.
- SQL-literate hires productive in weeks, via standardized templates.
- Senior consultants codify patterns; juniors deliver safely at speed.
🚀 Platform Consolidation
- Green-light to decommission four legacy warehouses.
- Standardized Data Vault on Oracle Exadata improves auditability.
- Auto-generated documentation sustains governance and onboarding.
- Architecture Snapshot: Ethias’s core source is an IBM mainframe hosted by NRB, complemented by Salesforce, cloud accounting applications, and CSV files. Data is modeled using Data Vault (hubs, links, satellites) to preserve history and lineage, then published to data marts for analytics and reporting.
- Agile Collaboration: Working in agile mode, the team held regular sessions with business stakeholders to validate “quick-and-dirty” prototypes before full build-out. This approach aligned expectations early and ensured each sprint delivered visible outcomes.
- Governance and Documentation: WhereScape’s metadata-driven approach standardized naming conventions, data types, and object patterns. Automated documentation—generated from 3D and RED repositories—improved transparency, supported audits, and accelerated onboarding.
- Oracle Exadata Fit: Automated generation of native Oracle code ensured performant ELT/ETL on Exadata. Standard patterns reduced regression risk during changes and simplified promotion between environments.
- Data Sources and CDC: The shift from weekly batch to CDC on the mainframe shortened latency dramatically. If data is available, extraction now takes seconds, supporting near real-time requirements without fragile custom scripts.
“If you have a junior consultant on WhereScape you can bypass the templating stage because it’s already been done by a senior consultant, and the junior person can add data without knowing about the stages before that. They can learn that after. But with hand coding you have to know everything before you start. With WhereScape you can integrate people without months of learning until you have a consultant who can manage development independently.”
– Samuel Matiuz, BI/ETL Consultant at NRB
