Insurance Company Utilizes LDU Solution to Improve its Data Testing Practices
Challenges
The Insurance firm’s manual data testing process was using Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to perform data comparisons between source flat files and xml files to the target IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server data warehouses. The process took extensive time to import query results from a SQL analyzer into MS Excel or MS Access for data validation. Excel and Access were not designed to compare large volumes of data. The insurer had to slice and dice the data due to the limitations of these tools. Federal regulations require them to test 100% of their data, so sampling of data (comparing a limited size) was not an option.
Implementation
The Insurance firm purchased LDU Solution and was able to quickly get up-to-speed on creating data validation tests (Query Pairs).
LDU Solution assisted them with:
- creating automated, reusable tests quickly
- grouping tests in logical test suites to obtain coverage over problematic areas
- executing tests nightly, automatically after ETL processes have completed
- receiving email notifications on completion of tests and pass/fail results
- pinpointing potential data issues that can be solved by the development team
- validating 100% of their data quickly, therefore improving overall data quality
Benefits
A single test that used to take over 1 hour now takes 10 minutes using LDU Solution. MS Excel and MS Access were no longer needed for data comparison. With hundreds of tests to execute and the ability to run them at off-hours, the time savings was dramatic. The team was able to reduce the testing time from 6 months as a manual process to less than 2 weeks of automated testing and analysis while increasing the amount of data validated. After the initial test team’s success, LDU Solution quickly propagated to other teams within the organization. This prompted upper management, who had noticed the improvements and ROI in their data testing process, to purchase additional licenses of LDU Solution to expand its use to additional teams. These teams now utilize LDU Solution as an integral part of their daily data quality process to uncover bad data that, had the data gone invalidated, could have potentially cost the Insurance firm millions of dollars in regulatory fines.
About Us
LDU Business Services is a consulting and managed services firm dedicated to helping businesses enabling them to better decision making. With over a decade of experience in the analytics and Business Performance Management (BPM), LDU offers customers, business intelligence with the choice of analytic tool selection from suite of analytic tools, predictive modeling development, real time streaming analytics, profitability costing models, BPM design and delivery optimization and best practices for financial planning.
LDU guides its customers on business modelling solutions enabling better analysis and insights into their data. We believe that the power of technology combined with best practices will give customers the ability to make fact-based decisions. Our combined expertise in banking, manufacturing, consumer products, telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and energy verticals bring a powerful and unique value proposition to our clients
Value To Our Customers
Access to data for your business today is easy. Making fact-based value-added decisions from critical information – that’s the hard part. LDU is a consulting firm specializing in the implementation and optimization of best of breed business analysis and financial systems solutions. We focus on solving complex data analytics issues to enable fact-based decision making for our clients.
