One of South Africa`s largest life and health insurers, Metropolitan Life, has cut down on report costs using enterprise business intelligence (BI) tools to port mainframe data online.
The weekly sales reports - containing new policy data from Metlife`s sales regions in southern Africa - are generated from two and a half million rows of information on an IBM mainframe. 1500 new records are captured each week and a batch of 10 000 records is run at month`s end.
Decision Support manager, Susan Delport, says: "the project has reduced delivery time to regional managers and simplified the process of analysing reports on arrival.
"Because the reports are so bulky, production costs and delivery time diluted their value. Managers were also unlikely to get the full benefit since the information they needed was buried in reams of text."
Metlife consulted business intelligence specialist PQ Business Intelligence, a Q Data Consulting division, for assistance with the project. Using Cognos PowerPlay, PQBI ran a proof of concept to extract information from an Oracle data mart to replicate the report online.
"This had to be done very carefully to keep the printed report format intact and maintain consistency of usage," says PQBI senior consultant, Gill Staniland. "We developed the PowerPlay model incrementally for immediate and measurable results, giving users time to adapt to the process."
Go-ahead for converting the full report was given in August last year, and the project went live in November.
"Besides the time and cost savings, the project leveraged our strategy to take decision support information online," says Delport. "Looking ahead, PowerPlay Web gives us the option of publishing the report to our intranet, in its original format, and gives managers access to accurate data for improved decision-making."
The next phase of the project will introduce security levels to give users access to report data based on security privileges.
"Security levels will give regional managers drill-down access to policy-level information for their region and is an important precursor to meeting our enterprise-wide BI objectives," says Delport.
Metlife is currently extending the scope of the project to include reporting on New Business Statistics. This will enable management to analyse policy turnaround times.
A project to develop mainframe usage cost reports for all the operational divisions is also underway.
"The new project will report the cost of mainframe usage, giving managers better control and allowing them to budget for usage ahead of time."
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