The Road Accident Fund (RAF), the R1,4bn-a-year parastatal, has become the 16th organisation in South Africa to decide on Red Brick as the database engine for its data warehouse. The decision comes as the RAF looks to change its business radically in order to reduce its actuarial deficit and focus its quality of service to all South African roadgoers. Red Brick distributor Software Futures, a company in the Computer Configurations Group, Abraxas Business Intelligence and the RAF itself will implement the data warehouse. Brio has been selected as the front-end tool for viewing the data warehouse and VMark`s DataStage has been selected as the extraction toolset. Red Brick will run against Informix, the RAF`s transaction database. Red Brick will be implemented on a Unix platform: Windows NT was not considered because the data warehouse will need to scale to extreme levels: 500GB inside two years and beyond a Terabyte in five years. The RAF compensates South African road users for losses sustained in a motor accident. As such, says MIS manager Niel Claassens, it is a hybrid organisation: partially medical aid; partially short-term insurance company "with a long tailend"; partially life insurance company, and even partially burial company. "We generate income from a fuel levy and pay it out on some 70 000 claims a year. Our payouts are based on claims submitted by attorneys, and while we settle most claims, we have no scientific benchmarks for knowing how much to estimate for medical costs for specific injuries. Red Brick will help us define benchmarks," says Claassens. Red Brick will sit between the RAF`s billing evaluation system and Informix. The billing system will write results to Informix as they happen and feed the Red Brick data warehouse weekly. Through this model the RAF aims to develop an understanding of correct pricing for claims. "Although we have a policy of settling all claims fairly, we could be overpaying on some of our medical claims," says Claassens. "By itemising claims from attorneys and matching these to generally accepted tariff structures, we can focus on where we are over-paying." The RAF also aims to reduce fraud. "Fraud is a part of life in this environment, but we need to identify where it`s happening and reduce it," says Claassens. "The integrated data mining of Red Brick will assist hugely." A further application of the data warehouse will be to identify optimal levels of payment to people whose capacity to generate income has been impaired in an accident. "Right now we have to guess how much income a person would lose through the loss of, say, a hand. A pianist would be more adversely affected in this example than a waiter. By linking the data warehouse to international occupational and disability models together with medical reports we can set and continually refine payment levels which have a scientific basis." The RAF will aggregate five years` worth of data before this application becomes viable. Once this data is aggregated, the RAF will also use it to predict the frequency and treatment costs of any injury type on South African roads. Claassens expects the data warehouse to pay for itself inside of two years through reduced payouts as a consequence of improved focus. There will initially be 10 users of the data warehouse, but Claassens expects this number to grow. Claassens gives particular credit to RAF board member Duif de Waal, who was "a passionate executive sponsor" of the data warehouse. "Without such an executive sponsor it can be impossible to get a project off the ground," Claassens observes. "With our 16th customer we are on track to making Red Brick the de facto data warehouse database," says Aubrey van Aswegen, GM of Data Futures at Software Futures. "We look forward to helping the RAF deliver ongoing benefit from its data warehouse."
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