Insurance Leader Enables Business Users, Frees IT Staff ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Financial Services, Insurance

Customer Profile

With roughly 3,000 employees and more than half of the 100 largest U.S. companies as clients, Pacific Life Insurance Company is a leading provider of insurance products, annuities, and mutual funds.

Business Situation

The Life Division’s reliance on IT personnel to access data and create reports had become time-consuming and inefficient. It needed a standard data environment with easy-to-use reporting capabilities.

Solution

The company deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition with Business Intelligence features, including SQL Server 2005 Integration Services and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

Benefits

■ Data integration and standardization

■ Easy data access and reporting

■ Improved business and IT efficiency

■ Reduced costs

| | |“Enabling our business users to access our data warehouse directly through dynamic reports and queries has been a true testament to the power, functionality, and accessibility of SQL Server 2005.”

Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of Information Technology, Pacific Life Insurance Company

| |

| | | |The Life Division of Pacific Life Insurance Company had a strong dependency between its business and |

| | | |information technology (IT) workers. The executives, business analysts, finance personnel, and |

| | | |customer service representatives who rely on corporate data to do their jobs had to frequently employ|

| | | |IT specialists to help access the desired data and put it into meaningful reports. The process was |

| | | |slow for business users and exceptionally time-consuming for the IT staff. To enable its business |

| | | |groups to be more self-sufficient and free its IT personnel from constantly creating business |

| | | |reports, Pacific Life deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition with Business |

| | | |Intelligence features. The new solution has helped the company’s Life Division standardize its data |

| | | |infrastructure, ease data access and business reporting, improve business and IT efficiency, and |

| | | |reduce costs. |

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Situation

Founded in 1868 and claiming more than half of the 100 largest United States companies as clients, Pacific Life Insurance Company is a long-standing insurance industry leader. Over the years, however, a costly dependency had developed between its business personnel and IT specialists. The more than 800 executives, business analysts, finance workers, and customer service representatives of the company’s Life Division were largely reliant on the IT staff to access corporate data to produce business-critical, ad hoc reports. Accordingly, the IT staff was constantly burdened with requests from the business groups, taking them away from key infrastructure enhancement projects.

“It was a problematic and unproductive circumstance,” recalls Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of Information Technology at Pacific Life. “Our business groups could not gather client and policy data or generate meaningful reports on their own, and were forced to wait for IT specialists to do it for them. Of course, these frequent requests took the IT groups away from their day-to-day tasks. Each side was encumbered by the other.”

In delivering life insurance products and services to large premium accounts, the company’s Life Division was supporting more than a quarter-terabyte of data spread across a mainframe, two clusters of database servers, and multiple locations. Five of the organization’s 70 databases were reserved for reporting, housing data related to policies, agents, finances, transactions, and new business opportunities. Yet these reporting databases contained complex data schema with more than 20 tables and multiple data fields each. Consequently, important business information was difficult to access, compile, and analyze.

To further complicate matters, various business users needed to obtain the data for differing reasons and from assorted locations. The Life Division’s regional offices across the United States require data access and report generation to help them support the organization’s independent agents. These regional offices are responsible for processing sales proposals, delivering presales information, and submitting insurance applications for underwriting. The division’s home office requires data and reports that outline business performance and facilitate underwriting, claim processing, account inquiries, and regional office support.

These disparate offices need a variety of reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Data related to the number and type of policies, the company catalog, account demographics, specific business inquiries, company performance, and quarterly accounting is pulled, compiled, and examined regularly. More often than not, these reports were custom-built directly on the mainframe—a complex and time-consuming undertaking for the company’s IT staff. Even when reports were prepackaged and embedded in the organization’s internal applications, Cosgrove indicates that IT specialists had to help business users understand and utilize them.

“Reports are critical to our business, and we have the data necessary to produce those reports,” he says. “However, our data systems are so dense and our reporting requirements so varied, we needed a robust, standardized, easy-to-use solution that would enable our various business factions to be more self-sufficient and free our IT groups to focus on infrastructure improvement projects.”

Solution

Cosgrove and his IT staff decided to standardize the Life Division data warehouse using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. The organization deployed SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence features, particularly SQL Server 2005 Integration Services and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, to connect its disparate data sources, improve information access, and enable dynamic report generation.

“SQL Server 2005 Integration Services and Reporting Services deliver an advanced and easy-to-use solution for linking all of our data and giving our business users the ability to generate reports without the assistance of IT specialists,” explains Christian Berke, Data Services Manager at Pacific Life. “The solution helps our various constituents—regardless of technical expertise—access and compile data from multiple sources and gives us an unified view of our information assets.”

With exceptional integration capabilities and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) functionality, SQL Server Integration Services enables the Life Division of Pacific Life to more easily manage, access, and analyze information from its array of data sources. The Integration Services data-integration pipeline architecture allows SQL Server 2005 to consume data from multiple sources simultaneously, perform multiple complex transformations, and then concurrently distribute the data to multiple destinations. Therefore, the organization’s data warehouse can be used not only for large data sets, but also for complex data flows. As the information flows from source to destination, the stream of data can be split, merged, combined, and otherwise manipulated with other data streams.

“SQL Server Integration Services has become the glue that fuses our mainframe, databases, and applications,” Berke notes. “It gives us the ability to link, compile, and manipulate our data in a number of ways from any of our data sources. As a result, business users with diverse requirements can easily access and analyze information that is essential to their jobs without knowing where it resides, how it links to other related data, or how to pull it out of a service-oriented architecture system.”

With tight integration of multiple data sources and linkages between previously uncorrelated data, Pacific Life has been able to take full advantage of SQL Server Reporting Services. Using a data flow from Integration Services as a data source, Reporting Services offers a comprehensive enterprise reporting solution that enables the creation and management of both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports. It delivers a sophisticated yet easy-to-use environment for authoring, administering, and delivering reports, which helps Pacific Life business users interact with data in an ad hoc fashion and generate their own reports from scratch.

“Due to the complexity of our data infrastructure, our business users could barely access data in the past, let alone generate functional reports,” says Berke. “Today, those same business users are able to quickly extract the desired information and create business reports in a variety of formats, from a number of sources and for a range of applications.”

Berke indicates that Report Builder, a new feature of Reporting Services, has been a key component in enabling nontechnical users to generate their own reports. An ad hoc reporting tool, Report Builder incorporates a user-friendly business query model that allows Pacific Life personnel to quickly create robust reports. Because Report Builder offers usability similar to familiar software such as the Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software and the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® presentation graphics program, it is easy to utilize and does not require a deep technical understanding of the underlying data sources.

In addition to SQL Server Integration Services and Reporting Services, the Life Division is planning to make use of SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services in the near future. Analysis Services offers high-scale online analytical processing and data-mining algorithms for in-depth data and business analysis. Berke expects that Analysis Services will help the Pacific Life IT staff build complex analytical models that facilitate enhancements to business operations.

Benefits

According to Cosgrove, SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence features—such as Integration Services and Reporting Services—have helped Pacific Life Insurance Company standardize its data infrastructure, ease data access and business reporting, improve business and IT efficiency, and reduce costs.

Data Integration and Standardization

SQL Server 2005 has enabled Pacific Life to standardize its data environment and the ways in which users access data and generate reports. The company was previously using Business Objects Crystal Reports, custom-built mainframe reports, and other application-specific reporting tools. Each required specific skill sets, limiting the number of people who could create, augment, and utilize the tools. SQL Server 2005 offers a standardized, familiar data and reporting environment for the Life Division of Pacific Life, ensuring consistency across the organization. SQL Server Integration Services provides seamless integration of multiple, previously unconnected data sources, and Reporting Services with Report Builder delivers a consistent set of reporting features.

“SQL Server 2005 has enabled us to build a solid, uniform foundation for data management, reporting, and analysis,” says Cosgrove. “Regardless of whether the user is part of a business analysis, finance, client service, or IT group, the process for accessing and compiling data is straightforward and standardized.”

Easy Data Access and Reporting

Because the solution offers a consistent, standardized data infrastructure and user-friendly reporting capabilities, access to company data and the creation of business reports have been significantly eased. Pacific Life business personnel are now able to extract account, policy, agent, and transaction information and create a variety of reports, regardless of whether the reports are embedded in internal applications, delivered as scheduled or real-time analysis mechanisms, or generated in ad hoc fashion.

According to Berke, the organization’s business personnel had not generated a single report on their own prior to the deployment of SQL Server Integration Services and Reporting Services. In less than two months after deployment, however, the business groups had successfully generated more than 50 reports without the assistance of IT specialists.

“SQL Server 2005 offers an environment and set of tools that we all understand,” explains Berke. “We now have an open, flexible data infrastructure that allows different business users to write and produce their own reports in any way they want at any given time, without knowledge of code queries, PivotTable® views, or relational databases.”

Improved Business and IT Efficiency

By helping all users to be more self-sufficient in finding and utilizing company data, and freeing IT specialists from continually generating reports, SQL Server 2005 has improved the overall efficiency of both the business and IT groups. Business analysts, executives, finance workers, and client service representatives no longer have to wait for IT experts to produce reports. In addition, the Pacific Life IT staff no longer spends an inordinate amount of time building mainframe and custom reports and teaching business personnel how to use them.

Berke expects the new data infrastructure to reduce by 80 percent the time that the IT staff spends on developing mainframe and custom reports. “SQL Server 2005 has freed us from the shackles of mainframe reports,” he exclaims. “As a result, our IT personnel can spend more time on infrastructure enhancement projects that bring additional efficiencies to the business.”

Reduced Costs

The efficiency gains realized by the SQL Server 2005 deployment have reduced Pacific Life’s business and IT costs. Business users are achieving their data analysis objectives faster, and fewer IT personnel are required to create, manage, and distribute the company’s business reports.

“In our new business department alone, we have a set of 20 reports that previously necessitated a full-time IT person to administer,” says Berke. “Those reports have been completely handed over to the business analysts in the department, and we were able to reassign the IT specialist to other projects.”

“Enabling our business users to access our data warehouse directly through dynamic reports and queries has been a true testament to the power, functionality, and accessibility of SQL Server 2005,” concludes Cosgrove. “Reports that used to take our IT staff three days to generate are now created by business personnel in three seconds. SQL Server 2005 does everything we need in one, easy-to-use package.”

Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of Windows Server System, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.

For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to:

sqlserver

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Servers

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 |Microsoft Office

− Microsoft Office Excel 2003

− Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003

| |

“Reports that used to take our IT staff three days to generate are now created by business personnel in three seconds. SQL Server 2005 does everything we need in one, easy-to-use package.”

Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of Information Technology, Pacific Life Insurance Company | |

© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Excel, PivotTable, and PowerPoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published May 2006 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Pacific Life Insurance Company products and services, call (800) 800-7646 or visit the Web site at:

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“SQL Server 2005 has freed us from the shackles of mainframe reports.”

Christian Berke, Data Services Manager, Pacific Life Insurance Company

| |

“SQL Server 2005 has enabled us to build a solid, uniform foundation for data management, reporting, and analysis.”

Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of Information Technology, Pacific Life Insurance Company

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