Pulse

Nederlandse Loterij: winning with data

By Lewis - 11 May 2020

Nederlandse Loterij, the largest gaming company in the Netherlands, continues to invest in a promising future and has worked hard to strengthen the foundation of its organisation and to renew its portfolio. Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and co-founder of Nederlandse Loterij, explains how this allows the company to remain successful in a rapidly changing market and achieve good results.

Today, Nederlandse Loterij operates seven different games of chance: Staatsloterij, Lotto, Eurojackpot, Miljoenenspel, Lucky Day, Krasloten and Toto. Players can buy their lottery and sports betting tickets online or at one of over 5,000 points of sale throughout the country. Or they can play automatically via a subscription.

Every year Nederlandse Loterij invests millions in Dutch sports and 18 charities in the field of health and exercise. This way the organisation contributes to a happy, healthy and “sporty” country.

To set-up effective campaigns and develop new targeted products for its customers, Nederlandse Loterij has been focusing on gathering new insights from the data available to them. To help achieve this, the organisation has been using Stravito to help unleash the power of its insights.

OPERATING IN AN AGILE MANNER

As part of its efforts to become even more datadriven, Nederlandse Loterij works in multidisciplinary teams. Within each team marketers, business controllers, commercial analysts, product owners and business developers manage their brand. Recently, a Business Intelligence Specialist was added to help each team make more informed decisions based on queries performed on datasets and insights.

To achieve this, the Business Intelligence Specialist is able to analyse a wealth of data. Including information about players and points of sale, market research, consumer surveys and information about the competition. All of this data comes from a complex network of suppliers. So, Nederlandse Loterij set-up a data warehouse where Business Intelligence Specialists could carry out their analyses.

These results are stored as PowerPoint documents and were previously put in Sharepoint together with external research data, annual reports from the competition and other data sources. But, the increased amount of research and analyses made it difficult for marketers to find results for themselves.

As such, they were reverting their questions to the Business Intelligence team, who ended up spending a lot of time looking for their analyses instead of completing them.

MOVING FROM DATA-RICH TO DATA-DRIVEN

A core focus of Nederlandse Loterij was to predict even better whether campaigns and products will be successful. So, it was important they found a solution that ensured their Business Intelligence Specialists were analysing insights, instead of acting like librarians trying to find them. This is when they found Stravito.

Stravito’s SaaS solution works as an internal search engine, storing a company’s research information securely in the cloud then making it searchable and accessible to a company’s employees. Employees can work more efficiently with insights, and knowledge remains available to the organisation.

What’s more, Stravito is powered by machine learning and AI that’s built and trained to ensure documents are automatically classified when uploading.

Stravito was exactly what Nederlandse Loterij’s Business Intelligence department needed. The team was looking for a better way to handle Nederlandse Loterij’s information.

Their team told us: “Windows Explorer wasn’t working very well because of access and rights issues, and Sharepoint was a hassle.

“The proper ‘tagging’ of reports often took a relatively long time and was not always done correctly. Information was not stored in the right place. And, the question of whether research had been carried out and, if so, where it could be found, could usually only be answered by one or two people within the organisation.

“Now that data plays such a central role at Nederlandse Loterij, an easy-to-use and conclusive system for research reports is a prerequisite for success. Securing knowledge for the long term is more of a challenge than you might think. Employees leave, organisations change the structure or merge. Stravito offers a solution for this.”

So, Nederlandse Loterij decided to implement Stravito and made rapid progress with it.

“HAVE YOU LOOKED IN STRAVITO?”

To make adoption of the platform as easy as possible, all employees have secure access to Stravito. The employees do not have to remember a new login and password.

The Business Intelligence Specialists have created a suitable tagging system to identify and categorise documents. The tags contain characteristics such as year, research area and source. All analyses have been uploaded into Stravito and tagged automatically, and now new documents and reports can easily be added via drag & drop.
Today, 80 per cent of the 110 employees in the multidisciplinary teams are using Stravito’s SaaS application.

And, if someone comes to the Business Intelligence team for information, they ask them first: “Have you looked in Stravito?”

Stravito has encouraged a fast learning curve at Nederlandse Loterij, increasing the selflearning ability of the organisation whilst ensuring that information remains available. Even new employees benefit as when they join they immediately gain access to relevant analyses within Stravito. Again, saving a lot of time and searching.

Thor Olof Philogène is the CEO and co-founder of Stravito, an AI-powered search and discovery application for market intelligence and insights at global organisations. Recognised by Accel as one of the top 100 SaaS companies in Europe and Israel, Thor leads Stravito’s business operations. He has secured €8m in funding from leading European investors, and counts companies including Carlsberg, Electrolux and Danone as customers.

Prior to Stravito, Thor held many prominent leadership positions. He founded and sold his first business in 2010, and went on to become the Chief Revenue Officer at fintech company iZettle, which has since been acquired by Paypal. Here, Thor scaled the growth division from one person to a 200-strong team covering 12 markets globally. Thor holds a M.Sc. in Business Administration from Stockholm School of Economics.