Centric

The Business Need

The investment division of a large insurance company manages the cash earned by other business units by investing in instruments of varying complexity and duration. The division’s disparate systems and non-homogeneous business processes were neither providing the data needed to manage the investment portfolio efficiently, nor were they able to report performance back to the business units. Poor data quality, minimal data governance and data anomalies plagued their systems.  To manage the portfolio, staff relied on manual processes, disparate spreadsheets and ad-hoc reporting applications.

The Right Skills

The client partnered with Centric to create and implement an asset management system using leading edge Business Intelligence applications and technologies.
 

The Transformation

Centric helped create standard business processes to standardize incoming data flows. Next, the team designed an Oracle data warehouse to facilitate the publication, uploading, enriching and exporting of information to appropriate parties.  Finally, the team created a mechanism to test the highly complex data flows between the investment division and the company’s other business units.

The implementation exploited a mix of technologies including standard financial analysis packages, Business Intelligence tools (Informatica and Business Objects), databases (SQL Server, Access, Lotus Notes, Oracle) and numerous test and data management tools. Upon completion, the data warehouse will contain more than 400 data sources and rely upon 135 data adaptors.

To deliver this large multiyear project the team organized into four competencies: Project Management, Data Analysis, Integration & Development and Testing. Centric’s responsibilities included overall program management, as well as the management and staffing of the data analysis and test teams. Centric led the effort to create the methodology for process mapping and re-engineering, define business requirements, and manage testing and quality assurance.

The project delivered in three distinct phases. The Project Initiation phase defined the overall data flows and processes, the technical architecture, and imported portfolio performance and measurement data. Phase 2 added more data sources providing additional portfolio performance and measurement data. In Phase 3, legacy systems were shut down and performance and measurement data migrated into the new data warehouse.

Results

The project is widely regarded as one of the more successful IT projects undertaken at the insurer. By building the data warehouse, the investment division now has a consistent, error-free view into the performance of its investment portfolio. It also has an efficient and accurate mechanism to report investment results back to the business units. Furthermore, it now has a data management organization using standard reporting tools and technologies, laying the architectural foundation to support future growth in the business.