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 data
warehouse story
Client Summary
This insurance company experienced the common problem of having
several different computing environments while requiring a reporting
system to meet the needs of their customers. A new set of guidelines
was established requiring the IS department to perform services
for their customers which were never before performed. The most
critical part of the effort was the reporting component. A complete
set of pre-written, pre-tested, 3-D graphical reports were needed
as well as a complete ad hoc reporting system. The reporting systems
performance needed to be at its optimum level as other users around
the country had slow dial-in access to the reporting system. The
data was being housed in several environments including Cobol based
applications on mainframes, the A/S400 environment, and a Windows
environment which included Oracle and Lotus Notes.
RAD Actions
A software process was immediately put into place to track requirements,
issues, scheduling, and development. Communication among all departments
immediately became more productive. The process identified and defined
all players and their responsibilities. Research was conducted to
outline the business and technical flow of information between all
users and departments. Further research was conducted to establish
the technical foundation of the reporting system. Several tools
were evaluated. As new development was replacing the older information
systems throughout the company, data was moved to Oracle via batch
and real time. An information pipe was purchased to pump the Lotus
Notes data to Oracle. A simple SQL scripting software, ScriptStore,
was implemented for version tracking of all Oracle development.
The insurance company originally anticipated writing the entire
reporting system in SQL code. The first reports were not expected
to be complete for 5 weeks. RAD research was conducted and a data
warehousing reporting system was purchased which produced complex
and useful 3-D reports in 5 days. The cost savings between purchasing
and implementing the data warehousing system as opposed to writing
everything from scratch amounted to over $400,000 and 3 months time
saved.
Value for our client
The most important value for gained by our client was the ease their
customers could produce complex 3-D ad hoc reports. The second most
important value gained by our client was being able to offer these
services to their clients 4 months ahead of schedule. This allowed
for increased revenue as new services were rendered earlier than
expected. The third most important value gained by our client was
efficient maintenance and on-going development of the reporting
system. The SQL scripting version tracking system as well as the
data warehousing reporting 4GL system allowed the insurance company
to support the on-going development with 1/3 the staff as originally
planned. The rate of bugs creating during the development and maintenance
was reduced by over 80% due to the use of software tools and processes
implemented. The fourth most important value for our client was
independence. With the training provided, the insurance company
staff is now able to produce new reports, and thus new services,
without relying on anyone. Though the insurance company may call
on us in the future to help with another reporting engagement, they
also have the choice to do their own development without any other
help.
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