Case Study: Data Fixing

Background:
Defective data is a major cause of unreliability in a system and can result in considerable losses, both in revenue and reputation, if a suitable data management strategy is not in place.

Companies and organisations that manage their data as a strategic resource and invest in its quality are pulling ahead of their competitors in terms of reputation and quality.

Windsor Lifes mission statement is:

"To advance the profitable growth of Windsor Life by providing a professional service to our policyholders."

An integral part of providing this professional service has been the flexibility and quality of Windsor Lifes core administration system, ALPHA.  Windsor Life is committed to investing in the quality of its data and has, for a number of years, endeavoured to use data fixes to correct underlying data that has become incompatible with the ALPHA system.

A data fix is a correction to raw data usually applied to one client or policy.  However, a fix can sometimes be applied to a group of clients or policies. In June 2001, our sister company Design & Development Solutions Limited (DDSL) submitted a proposal to Windsor Life to provide a controlled system for the development, testing and implementation of data fixes.

In their proposal, DDSL anticipated the delivery of at least 300 data fixes per calendar month, this being an increase of 50% on figures delivered by the previous service provider. The new data fix service outlined in the DDSL proposal was based on a cost per fix basis and has provided considerable savings to Windsor Life in that only those fixes successfully implemented are charged for.

"Genus has implemented a Data Fix Control System which consistently delivers a high level of right first time data fix solutions, positively impacting system stability."
Sarah Myers
Head of Operations Processing
Windsor Life

Solution:
Resources common to both genus and DDSL designed, developed and implemented a Data Fix Control System that met business requirements specified by Windsor Life whilst maintaining the integrity and reliability of the ALPHA system.

The Data Fix Control System implemented by our experts is a complete system designed to control the processing of data fixes to the ALPHA system.  The system ensures that every data fix is monitored from inception through to implementation. No data fix could be implemented live without thorough checking by one of our experts and a Windsor Life business analyst.

A feature of the Data Fix Control System is to highlight incorrect data within ALPHA by automatically running a series of integrity checks on policies before, during and after a fix is implemented.

In addition to implementing a Data Fix Control System, our experts provided a data fix service that encompasses the following areas:

• Fix analysis and documentation.
• Fix solution in the format of optimised SQL.
• Extensive testing in a controlled environment.
• Live implementation.

From the beginning, we consistently delivered to agreed expectations, often exceeding them. Our understanding of Windsor Lifes business and its core administration system, ALPHA, has enabled us to provide accurate fixes at a rate of 98.5% correct on 1st attempt.

Our resources consistently worked to improve the efficiency of the data fix system and to implement cost effective changes.

Technologies:
Data fix solutions are written in SQL and processed by routines written in PL/SQL and UNIX scripts on an ORACLE database running under HP UNIX.

The automatic processing incorporated into the incident management system, TPLAN, was developed in Visual Basic.

genus...making sense