integrated insight - teradataapps.teradata.com/tdmo/v07n03/pdf/ar5378.pdf · to develop consistent...
TRANSCRIPT
num Group, formerly UnumProv-
ident, is the industry leader in
disability income insurance and a top
provider of voluntary benefits, life and
long-term-care insurance products. The
firm employs nearly 10,000 people world-
wide and delivered $6.2 billion in total
customer benefits in 2006.
Today’s Unum was forged in a pair of
mergers. The first joined Provident and Paul
Revere in 1997. The second, just two years
later, merged the newly formed Provident
Companies with Unum Corporation. This
rapid convergence of three well-established
organizations created an industry power-
house on one hand and a thicket of
management and integration challenges
on the other, as each company had its own
set of operational systems and its own
approach to structuring business data.
Soon after the initial merger the com-
pany realized a data warehouse would be
beneficial to support data rationalization
and centralized reporting. “Our goal was
Integrated insight
U
Unum Group grows its Teradata Warehouse into an active platformfor effective management and responsive customer service. by Bill Tobey
TeradataMagazine.com
Photo
grap
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ara Reyno
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CASE STUDY
Bob Dolmovich, vice president of businessintegration and data architecture, right,and Kyle Prescott, database administrator,share how foresight for future use of theTeradata Warehouse allows it to fill verydifferent roles at Unum Group.
PAGE 1 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378
to develop consistent performance metrics
across the combined companies,” recalls
Bob Dolmovich, vice president of busi-
ness integration and data architecture.
“We needed to be able to track sales and
a variety of other activity and profitability
measures in order to understand more
about our product performance and our
distribution channels.”
Building on a provenand scalable technologyIn choosing the company’s data warehouse
platform, Dolmovich and his team made a
strategic decision to build on proven tech-
nology. “We had enough business issues to
deal with that we didn’t want to be wrest-
ling with technical issues too,” he explains.
“So we went looking for a scalable solution
that may have been overkill for the data
volumes that Provident and Paul Revere
required at the time. We really wanted
to ensure that the technology would meet
our future performance needs. In hind-
sight, given the additional mergers that
were just down the road, it was exactly
the right decision.”
In fact, the second merger—of Provi-
dent and Unum—was significantly larger
in scale and raised the integration stakes
commensurately. Ultimately, the scope of
the combined companies drove a decision
to blend all lines of business on an expanded
Teradata Warehouse. In mid-2000 the firm
launched a major platform upgrade and
accelerated the efforts to assimilate and
rationalize data from most of its 34 policy
and claim administration systems, which
included a wide range of mainframe, mid-
range and distributed source systems.
The original data warehouse platform
was a two-node system. Early applications
for the larger data warehouse included
a wide range of monthly performance
analytics—everything from claim trends
and premium trends and persistency—to
daily sales reporting. Another priority was
consolidating and integrating the many
isolated and often redundant stores of
customer data located in the various oper-
ational systems. To address this challenge,
Unum implemented a Web services-based
customer data integration hub, which in
conjunction with the Teradata Warehouse
provides customer data aggregation,
standardization and quality control.
Evolving to active enterprise intelligenceAs integration and rationalization efforts
enabled by the data warehouse established
a solid basis for enterprise reporting and
performance analysis, Unum began exper-
imenting with more frequent data loads
and more active, operational business
applications. “In many cases, after
bringing policy and claim data into the
warehouse for actuarial purposes, we were
able to enhance the feeds or the timing
of the feeds and ask ourselves what else
we might do with the data,” Dolmovich
recalls. “Once you’ve done the initial hard
work of accessing, transforming, loading
and scrubbing your data, it’s really easy
to get extra value from it with relatively
little extra effort.”
Unum’s more active applications vary
widely in the company’s business focus and
in the types of workloads placed on the data
warehouse. Two notable examples illustrate
the diversity and scope of these applications:
> Individual disability valuation is the
actuarial process of modeling aggregate
policy values and the financial reserves
required under law to meet projected
claim obligations. Unum actuaries
developed a more accurate and flexible
CASE STUDY
Solution benefits
> Standardized management reportingand key performance indicators
> Improved capital allocation: Dailypolicy and claim valuation providesmore detailed and accurate reserveforecasts
> Improved customer service: Customercalls handled within target responsetimes increased from 60% to 95%
> Improved labor efficiency: Faster callrouting and simple query automationallowed 30 call center representativesto be reassigned to higher-value tasks
“In many cases, after bringing policy and claim datainto the warehouse for actuarial purposes, we wereable to enhance the feeds or the timing of the feeds andask ourselves what else we might do with the data.”
—Bob Dolmovich, Unum Group
PAGE 2 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378
process for managing nearly
$12 billion in reserves by using the
data warehouse to capture policy and
claim change data from eight separate
administration systems and recal-
culating reserve values daily. The
calculation outputs alone occupy 750
million rows in the data warehouse.
Business impacts include faster and
simpler monthly closing, improved
Sarbanes-Oxley controls and hard-
dollar return on investment (ROI) that
the company will describe only as 10 to
12 times its original projections.
> Interactive voice response (IVR) and
Web self-service was a complex project
aimed at improving the level of service
offered to customers and brokers.
Active data warehouse queries were
used to support three separate types
of interactions via three different
customer and partner service systems:
• Intelligent call routing at Unum’s
customer service call center
• Self-service claim status inquiries
on a customer-facing IVR system
• Underwriting status inquiries on
a broker-facing Web portal
Each of these applications resulted
in a new active workload of tactical
queries against the data warehouse.
Additionally, hourly data loads from
the various underwriting systems were
implemented to provide near real-
time visibility at the broker portal.
In turn, these instances of active en-
terprise intelligence have significantly
improved the level of service Unum
provides to customers and partners,
while substantially reducing the cost
of delivery.
One data warehouse, multiple rolesAs the tactical workloads associated
with Unum’s more active applications
have grown in volume and importance,
proactive workload management and
monitoring have become a necessity. “Our
current workloads run about 45 percent
batch ETL [extract, transform and load]
processes, 35 percent ad hoc and 25
percent tactical queries from the Web ser-
vices and call center applications,” explains
Kyle Prescott, Teradata database admin-
istrator at Unum.
“We use Priority Scheduler to segment
workloads and Teradata Manager to monitor
the system,” Prescott continues, “and we
run canary queries. Our philosophy is to let
people access the data, but to watch them
closely. We’re not using any denial-type
software, but we do run lists of top-100 CPU
users and top queries from a capacity per-
spective. We try to stay on top of that so we
can protect those tactical queries. They’re
not a large part of the overall workload, but
we think of them as our golden egg.” This
use of Priority Scheduler is especially im-
portant considering that the average query
volume is greater than 10 million queries
per month with peak volume as high as
18 million queries per month.
Unum’s Teradata Warehouse now fills
two very different roles for the com-
pany—one is historical and analytical,
the other is active and operational. “It
is certainly the pre-eminent business
intelligence platform for our U.S.
business, and it’s the tool of choice for
business analytics, pricing, valuation,
reserve modeling and forecasting—all
traditional roles,” Dolmovich explains,
“but it also has an increasingly important
role in customer and partner service that
it is able to fill because of its stability and
24x7 performance.
“And the Teradata Warehouse has given
us something else: a fresh model for data-
base management. Because we started this
system from scratch just 10 years ago, with
the benefit of prior experience and really
good tools, we’ve done a much better job
of clearly defining and controlling our
data. It’s a model for data management
and governance practice that we’re now
taking out of the business intelligence
space and back into our application
development processes for transactional
and operational systems.” T
Bill Tobey is a senior technology writer at Ford
Sherman, a communication services agency.
Behind the solution: Unum Group
Database: Teradata Database V2R6.0.2
Server: 10-node Teradata 5450 Server
Users: 2,500+ internal business users and thousands of additional broker and customer users via portal and call center applications
DBAs: 3 (2 full time, 1 part time)
Data Model: Third Normal Form
Operating System: UNIX MP-RAS
Storage: Spinning disk: 29TB. Customer data space: 7.9TB.Actual data: 3.4TB.
Teradata Utilities: BTEQ, MultiLoad, FastLoad, Teradata Active System Management,Teradata Manager, Teradata Priority Scheduler and Teradata TPump
Tools/Applications: Teradata Warehouse Miner and products from Business Objects,Cognos and Hyperion
Visit TeradataMagazine.com toread Kyle Prescott’s article onUnum Group’s successful useof Teradata’s VPN for support.
TOnline
PAGE 3 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378