Metropolitan in R3.5m call centre consolidation with PQ Africa

Life insurance giant Metropolitan has gone live with a R3.5 million pilot project merging two lines of business in a consolidated client-centric interface for its call centre agents.

The new interface integrates previously separate screens of information for Metropolitan`s Ordinary Business and Voluntary Group divisions, with a combined total of 8.9 million customers. Metropolitan`s call centre currently logs 1 500 calls a day.

Metropolitan outsourced the project to PQ Africa, with PQ Business Intelligence (PQBI) building the operational data store (ODS) that consolidates client and policy information across the business units for the call centre interface and the overall project including the implementation of the user interface was managed by PQ Project Management Office.

PQBI team leader Liz Robertson says the ODS created challenges centred on the core differences between the business lines in question. "The most complicated part of the process was to establish and implement the business rules for the data migration and merge, given the complex differences between the two lines of business," says Robertson.

"In order to combine multiple live data sources into one target database, the staging process had to be created from scratch. This included extracting the data from Metropolitan`s operational mainframe platforms, generating the new flat files, and performing the ETL (extract, transform and load) process on the data for the Oracle call centre database."

PQBI used Ascential Software`s DataStage software (for which it is the largest value-added reseller in SA) for the ETL stage, along with custom scripts developed for the mainframe data extracts.

"The initial ETL of 9GB of mainframe data took a week and required 54GB of disk space for the various intermediate steps," says Robertson.

The lengthy ETL process was due partly to the large volumes of data and partly to the complexity of the transformations taking place.

"Batch and online operations on the source databases means policy and client information changes regularly, and at month`s end up to 90% of policies can be updated. We developed PL1 programs to pick up the changes and daily ETL batches to load them into the call centre ODS."

In order to deliver the ODS on time and in budget, the 10-man team (four programmers from PQ Africa`s Consulting Services division and six PQBI consultants) was required to:

• .         Assist in the completion of the user requirements analysis (users being call centre agents and supervisors);

• .         Map user requirements to source database fields;

• .         Determine the business rules for data migration;

• .         Design the ODS;

• .         Develop all PL1 code for the initial load and overnight extracts;

• .         Develop all DataStage jobs for the initial and overnight ETL processes; and

• .         Develop the automation scripts that keep the process running on a nightly basis.

"This project is ideally the first phase of a long-term data consolidation project to deliver an ODS that provides a single client view for policies across all Metropolitan business units," says Robertson.

"The next step is the leap to real-time updating of the ODS, merging multiple business units into the data store and laying the platform for vastly improved service efficiency from the call centre."