Efficiency Gains
Pacific Life Re has improved workflow efficiencies using Pervasive Data Integrator’s reusable maps and user-friendly visual design studio.
On-time Project Milestones
The fast-track nature of the UK EDI Project led them to seek assistance from Pervasive FastTrack Training™, which helped move the project along with expertise, targeted training, and sharing of best practices.
Better Compliance
Pervasive Data Integrator™ has created more opportunities for Pacific Life Re analysts to ensure they have complete, current, accurate data across the entire portfolio to assess for cumulative risk over-exposure.
Printable Format
Pacific Life Re better manages client data with Pervasive Data Integrator
A reinsurer’s risk assessment capability is the cornerstone of its financial viability. Reliable, current data makes the difference between a reinsurer taking on an appropriate level of risk, or inadvertently incurring risk overexposure in its portfolio. Having a view of all data in the entire portfolio for assessment against risk exposure guidelines lets analysts determine individuals whose multiple policy exposures exceed guidelines and thus indicate the need to reinsure with another party. Even more, if integration of client data can be automated and managed through technology, it helps a reinsurer move to less manual policy reviews–and in all probability, to faster, better decision-making.
A significant presence in international markets, Pacific Life Re made a strategic decision to expand the uses of the electronic formatted data it received from business partners in order to improve its risk assessment processes. As part of its strategy, the company wanted to remove the cost and time hindrances of custom code in order to integrate many types of client data into a data warehouse serving analysts’ reviews of “policy accumulation.” Pervasive was chosen to provide the data integration for the work, referred to as the “UK EDI Project.”
Get more useful, complete information to analysts through EDI approach
Dedicated to its mission to manage capital at risk to deliver knowledge-based life reinsurance solutions to institutional business partners worldwide, Pacific Life Re sought to gain detailed insights into policy-level data across its entire portfolio. Analysts manually combed through policy data to determine instances where individuals might have multiple policies which, combined, exceeded Pacific Life Re’s guidelines of cumulative exposure. As data volumes climbed, manual processes did not scale accordingly. The company wanted to automate incoming data from all clients and load into a data warehouse to give analysts access to complete data for risk analysis. The challenge was where to find the data integration solution to achieve this outcome.
Pacific Life Re’s Head of IT Andrew Wild explained, “We wanted to use the data to improve the analysis process. If multiple clients we are reinsuring actually have the same life insured in their portfolio, we might be exceeding our exposure guidelines. But business partner data comes in multiple formats from different clients, so we needed an EDI approach to scrub all incoming data, standardize it, transform it and load it into a centralized data warehouse.”
To make their data-improvement strategy a reality, the company had to have data feeds constructed with simplicity, robustness and speed. “Custom code could not deliver what we wanted. Our IT mandate was straightforward – get more useful, complete data quickly into our analysts’ hands,” Wild pointed out.
Adaptable, out-of-the-box Pervasive Data Integrator is the solution for UK EDI Project
Pacific Life Re selected Pervasive Data Integrator™ to move the UK EDI Project along. With an adaptable out-of-the-box solution in hand, the project team rapidly created maps and transformations to meet project specifications. According to Technical Delivery Manager Khalid Hussain, who has worked extensively on the UK EDI Project, anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 records reach Pacific Life Re a month from each of its business partners – text and CSV files that must undergo transformation for loading into the data warehouse.
Hussain said, “Pervasive Data Integrator lets me validate, check and merge rows of data, format, and then load the data into an EDI table. I can take CSV files and use the ASCII delimited connector with Pervasive Data Integrator to load the records. For flat files, I use the Structured Schema Designer.”
Hussain easily loads to the EDI process staging table, and can do calculations, formatting, and concatenation of names and benefit codes, as well as add all premiums in the row written to the SQL 2005 database that powers the data warehouse. Six maps are used for process design and two for sub-process design and the queuing session. When a client’s bulk data has been processed and loaded, an automated email is sent to risk assessment analysts informing them that the data has been loaded and that the data warehouse was updated. Users then utilize analytic tools that reside on top of the database to assess the data for adherence to risk exposure guidelines and make any needed reinsurance recommendations.
Hussain commented, “The Pervasive process and schema designers have made my work more efficient. I’ve made a number of maps that I easily reuse as I bring additional clients on board. It’s a very quick process – and the drag-and-drop designer feature is very helpful. When I started using the mapping tool, I was new to it, but I was able to quickly bring maps to an advanced level to invoke SQL queries. It’s a very good tool–I have the ability to put in business logic to facilitate processes. And the large number of connectors lets me add additional databases to accommodate clients’ different source files.”
Data aggregation improvements mean better decisions
Pacific Life Re made an important decision to further improve data aggregation within its UK operations that have led to better data risk analysis within the company. The company’s strategy is straightforward: better bulk data centralization and administration leads to better evaluation, claims and experience analysis – and consequently, risk exposure is better monitored and controlled. Pervasive Data Integrator has proved to be an important resource in achieving the company’s goals. Pacific Life Re now has an ideal opportunity to quickly and more thoroughly analyze old policies, identify liabilities, and adjust our reinsurance levels externally and internally.
Pervasive allows ability to reliably bring on more partners
The smoothness of the data integration and deployment process with initial business partners’ data transformation and loading gives Pacific Life Re a powerful springboard to rapidly and reliably onboard additional partners, leveraging Pervasive Data Integrator’s reusable maps and processes. Meanwhile, its sister organization in Charlotte, North Carolina, has also implemented Pervasive Data Integrator and Pervasive Data Profiler™ for its own data warehousing initiative. The Charlotte team is also assessing Pervasive’s data profiling technology to enhance its ability to assess all incoming data for accuracy, quality and completeness.
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