Liberty Life, South Africa`s fourth largest insurance group, has become one of the country`s largest users of online analytical processing (OLAP) technology, using its OLAP implementation to allow some 400 users nationwide to gain access to corporate information in real-time.
This OLAP foundation is being used to feed Liberty`s marketing department with a range of reports that improve decision-making, help generate Liberty`s business statements, and are used as a foundation for the consolidated budgeting process.
As with many large organisations, Liberty has a wide range of operational and analytical systems. To ensure multiple, disparate data sources can be mapped against the analysis systems, Liberty installed Ardent`s DataStage Suite, the market`s leading data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) toolset. DataStage was supplied by Ardent VAR Global Technology Business Intelligence.
DataStage extracts data from the Boston-sourced Compass administration package, which runs against an Oracle database.
"Compass is the ideal application for Liberty, but it is proprietary software with a very complex data structure, generating over 500 tables," says Carien Lewarne, a software developer in the FSO Systems department at Liberty. "Using DataStage, Data is extracted, transformed into a consistent format, and then loaded into our Hyperion Essbase OLAP system."
Once the data has been loaded into Essbase, it is made available for viewing across the country through Hyperion Wired for OLAP or Microsoft Excel.
Adding complexity to the equation is Liberty`s Adabas mainframe production systems. "Using Natural, we extract data from Adabas into text files," says Fraser Pearson, also a software developer in the FSO Systems department. "These text files contain details such as our nation-wide branches and broker network. These text files are loaded into DataStage, and combined with extracts from Oracle."
Liberty`s Essbase database, running on Windows NT, has grown to 6GB in extent, with the actual database taking up 40% of the actual data, and calculations the balance.
"We have found significant benefit in staging data in our management information systems," adds Lewarne. "When you`re dealing in a complex environment, errors are inevitable. Staging data as we do with DataStage allows us to trap these errors before they can corrupt the database."
DataStage also removes the problem of complexity whenever changes are made to Compass. "Whatever changes are made to the source application are easily accommodated and mapped to Essbase by DataStage," says Pearson.
Liberty`s auditing department, which is deploying Sybase IQ, has reported similar ease of use in extracting data from Oracle.
DataStage as well as Essbase was supplied by Global Technology Business Intelligence, one of Ardent`s leading South African VARs.
Share
GBI
Global Technology Business Intelligence is a leading provider of enterprise solutions for the financial and other industries. For business analysis, products such as Essbase and Metify (for Activity Based Costing) are available; and for keeping business flowing, tools from Lucent (workflow), Jetform (on-line forms) and Janna (Customer Relationship Management) are available.