Ensuring the Data Integrity of a Major Systems Investment

This major international insurance giant is one of the world’s leading and longest standing international general insurers, managing £14.5 billion of investments.  The organization offers a portfolio of personal products that include motor, household, travel and pet insurance, while its commercial insurance products include motor, marine, engineering, liability, property and financial insurance.

Data Consistency Needed for Financial Data Warehouse

This company was launching a new, major initiative to create a financial data warehouse that would support data marts at the business unit level, to produce a variety of reports, including consolidated financial reporting and financial services authority (FSA) returns. A key challenge to this effort was earning the trust among the business units that both the data marts and financial warehouse contained consistent, complete and accurate data.

Concurrently, the company needed to eliminate slow and inefficient manual reconciliation processes, which at the time required eight full time employees working two days to complete monthly reconciliations.

A lack of user confidence in the accuracy of these systems and software could undermine their investment in SAP, the financial warehouse and the efficacy of the new reconciliation software, as well as impede the ability to achieve operational efficiency. Additionally, there were concerns that data integrity problems could increase compliance risk and decrease trust in the accuracy of both internal and external financial reporting.

“We needed to ensure consistency across our financial repositories,” said this companies Finance Change Requirements Leader. “We also needed a solution that did not rely on manual processes or spreadsheets to support a sound controls environment, which would enable us to meet corporate governance and regulatory requirements.

To assure a return on their investment in SAP and the financial data warehouse, mitigate compliance risk, improve data governance and ensure the consistency of financial information across key repositories, they implemented Precisely Data360.  This integrated enterprise data intelligence platform automates critical data quality rules and reconciliations within and between critical systems. Key automated reconciliations include:

• Daily end-to-end reconciliation of feeds from the SAP general ledger (GL) to the financial data warehouse
• Daily end-to-end reconciliation of feeds from the financial data warehouse to all of the data marts
• Monthly reconciliation of feeds from every data mart to the SAP GL

Read more about how this multi-national general insurance company tackled data quality and data consistency issues between the SAP general ledger, data marts and the financial data warehouse.