This nationwide provider of disability income insurance products for professionals, executives and business owners has served its customers for over 150 years. The company has a nationwide network of agents and agencies throughout the United States.
The company manages over 250,000 policies across five distinct nationwide systems, with over 4,000 active claims at any given time. Data constantly enters these systems from hundreds of offices nationwide. The company’s growth and the layers of legacy data systems that came with that growth meant the company held this data in multiple, detached data silos with little ability to communicate with one another.
The company knew of intrinsic problems in its data — individual inconsistencies would regularly be discovered during routine processing or maintenance — but the company lacked the ability to determine just how numerous and pervasive these errors were. Additionally, trying to retroactively transform a decade’s worth of data provided a significant challenge, particularly with older systems that had been since retired.
However, the company was aware that the quality of its data was a significant driver to the success of its business. Because the company’s very business is driven by the need for accurate data, inconsistent or inaccurate information presented a potentially significant liability in terms of lost revenue, increased costs and even potential regulatory issues. The company clearly saw that it required a consistent, reliable view of its data across the enterprise.
The company selected he award-winning DataFlux data quality and data integration platform. DataFlux technology offers a unique set of workflow tools built on an industry-leading technology platform that encompasses every facet of the data management process. Through its intuitive interface, DataFlux gives business users powerful data improvement capabilities and extensive control over data quality and data governance initiatives.
DataFlux technology allowed the company to address data quality issues at the source, putting the ability to examine data for business issues in the hands of business users through a powerful and award-winning graphical user interface that allows users to analyze, improve and control enterprise data.
With DataFlux solutions in place throughout the company, the benefits were quickly seen. In one instance, various departments had noticed that there were often inconsistencies in various client records in one particular field on the records — the birth date of the policyholder — during their routine processing of policies. This seemingly simple piece of information is of vital importance to the company, since many of its key business efforts are driven off of a policyholder’s age. Prior to DataFlux data profiling technology being in place, the company had no way of knowing how prevalent the issue was. With DataFlux, the company is now able to easily scan all its data and immediately identify records which required corrective action, before any negative business impact is seen.
Building on the success of its current initiative, the company has been actively implementing a data governance program, addressing data quality in source systems across the enterprise and preventing poor-quality data from entering into the system. These efforts have resulted in further savings in time, resources and money.