Data Migration for Leading Lloyds Insurer
This company is one of the largest independent insurers & reinsurers operating in the Lloyds market. They offer insurance & reinsurance around the world both through the Lloyds market and international branches.  The data migration was instigated by a strategic decision by the client to upgrade their legacy system to a state of the art Microsoft based system.

This initial assignment was to migrate the Motor Fleet line of business.  The migration included Broker Details, Clients, Policies, Risk Information, Vehicles, Claims (including Payments & Recoveries) and Financial Transactions. The data came from a variety of sources, including UNIX platforms and MS Access databases. We migrated up to 20,000 Clients and Policies, 300,000 Claims and 300,000 Vehicles dating back to 1993.

Complexities of this project included, but were not limited to, that fact that the new target system was still in the design and customisation phases and its development was taking place in parallel with the data migration.   Major transformation was also required in the Claims migration, the legacy system held each Claim in one large file which had many fields. The new target system was much more sophisticated, holding main claim details, claimants, representatives and reserves in separate tables. So to migrate the data we needed to create AD claimants with names advising the user that they were generated by the migration, we created TP claimants, representative records and reserve records for both AD & TP claimants.

The data cleansing stage of this migration was very complex, there was a requirement to migrate as much Policy History as possible so that going forward the users could see how each Policy had been built up on the new system. The issue was that the Policy History needed cleansing and filtering for each Policy before it was in a good enough state to migrate.  So using part automated and part manual resource we undertook a cleansing exercise which ultimately left the user with a very high quality of Policy History.  This as helped by our understanding of Insurance and which data would be of relevance to the business going forward.

After the initial Data Analysis of the legacy system had been done, we developed Modules which extracted the data from the legacy system, formatted and cleansed the data and imported the data into the target system. These were a mixture of 3gl programs to extract the data, SSIS routines to bulk load into SQL Server 2005, TSQL and CLR's written in C# to migrate and transform the data through the staging areas.

Once the project was underway we project managed the migration, lead the development and utilised some of the clients existing resource. During the project we held regular requirements and progress meetings with the Stakeholders which drove the project forward, and ensured the rules laid out by the business were maintained. For the Load and Acceptance Testing Stages of the migration we developed a series of Scripts & Checklists for the testers so they could perform various spot checks of the data to ensure the data appeared as expected and the business processes and interfaces worked.

At the time of writing the system and data migration is still being tested with a go-live date due to be announced soon.  Throughout this project, we have maintained an excellent relationship with the client. As a result of this and the Reconciliation success rates and accuracy of the above migration we are now developing the migration strategy for the next migration which will be Commercial Lines information from a different legacy system.

 

BUPA Global Healthcare Organisation
BUPA is a global health and care organisation with a turnover of £3.7 billion and business operations in seven different countries. To date we have carried two migrations for BUPA working with two separate specialist divisions in BUPA’s Manchester and London offices. 

The first migration at BUPA Manchester involved extracting large amounts of financial information from a legacy Oracle database. We then worked closely with an in-house team to clean, manipulate the data and load it into the target system.

The second migration at BUPA London was a redesign of a MS Access database which was used for recording Health Information Fact Sheet Review Information. Most of the work was performed remotely except for project group presentation/workshop meetings and initial analysis; where 1;1 contact with the Subject Matter Experts was essential in gathering the requisite knowledge as well as building good working relations with the relevant people.  The front and back ends of the database were redesigned to allow the user to produce the first and subsequent reviews of a Fact Sheet on the same report. The original data was then migrated into the new database along with the new report templates which had been specified.

Both of these projects where successfully completed due to the collaborative team effort between ourselves and BUPA staff.

 

CIA Insurance
CIA is a specialist motorcycle insurance broker who had a bespoke system based on a SQL Server database. We migrated in excess of half a million, Clients, Policies, Risk Details, Driver Details, and Claims & Convictions. The existing system held ABI codes at all levels, so once migrated each policy was up to re-quote level.

The analysis, development and testing for this migration took place over three months (with Christmas break being part of that period). Our expert knowledge of the insurance industry and sound data migration methodology enabled us to carry out the majority of this work remotely at Insurance Data Migrations head office   Once complete we went on site and migrated all of the data in one day over the weekend.  To also ensure the least amount of disruption to the business we used a number of hardware and software techniques to perform the live migration keeping processing time down to a minimum. 
 

Software Solutions Partners Ltd
SSP is a leading international technology provider for the insurance and financial sectors. With more than 40,000 users in over 50 countries, they are dedicated to long-term business advantage through complete solutions & services.

SSP recognised that the best way to delver a solution on time and within budget was to use a data migration specialist with expertise in there system and the Insurance Services Market.  We have a successful track record with SSP having carried out numerous large scale insurance migrations to their systems in the past.   On this occasion we were asked to review and improve the existing modules which were used to migrate data from competitors systems. The majority of the work involved writing an extension to an existing module to migrate Household Risk information. This would add major value to new customers because it would mean that the broker could quite quickly get to the point of renewing household policies from day one. We also improved the Routines used to migrate Private Car information, adding various ABI lookups, again to give the customer more complete information straight after go-live. We visited customer sites to extract sample data and performed tests to ensure that the modules were fully functional. We then wrote technical documents describing the new functionality and hosted meetings to hand over the work to the permanent staff at the end of the project.

 

Software Solutions Partners Ltd (Age Concern System Development)
We were commissioned to design and develop a system which was going to be used for a period of twelve months to migrate client, policy and household risk information from one insurer to another. On a daily basis the system would be run to pick up the policies that were due for renewal up to that day. The information was imported in the form of CSV files, the system then manipulated this data and stored the records in a database. During the project we liaised closely with the underwriting staff to ensure that the system was going to be completely robust before handing the system over to the operational staff. The system ran without a problem for the full twelve months.

 

Software Solutions Partners Ltd (Willis Commercial Network)
Originally all members of the Willis Commercial Network used the Grapevine system. During 2002 the strategic decision was made by SSP to gradually migrate all Willis brokers from Grapevine to Insight, which was a system based on an Oracle database.
There were around 80 Willis brokers and they were to be migrated at the rate of one to two per week, so the requirement was to build a robust Migration Module which could be reused for each site. Due to the nature of the data on Grapevine the module would have to be easily configurable to cope with the mapping of different insurers and risk classes for each broker.

The data involved was a mix of Commercial & Personal Lines, Clients, Policies, Risk details and Claims were transferred. We also migrated large amounts of Policy Schedules which were held in MS Word format. This involved developing a Module which would load each schedule into MS Word, merge the data from the Grapevine system, and attach a new MS Word template, then save the document as an Insight document.

 

Grapevine Software Ltd (Performed around 100 insurance data migrations)
Prior to setting up his own company, Paul Johnson worked for Grapevine Software Limited for over ten years. Grapevine was an independent Software House who provided administration systems for Insurance Intermediaries. Whilst working at Grapevine, Paul progressed from being an Analyst Programmer to Development Manager, during this period Paul was also responsible for all data migrations, both too and from the Grapevine system.
During this time data was migrated from all of the leading Intermediary systems, Misys, Policymaster, CDL, Electra, BrokerPak and ACT to name a few. In total over 100 migrations were performed. A typical migration would include, Clients, Policies, Personal Lines, Commercial Lines, Documents and Claims. Paul not only performed the migrations but he developed and maintained the migration routines too, updating them when necessary and ensuring that the end users were getting the best migrations possible.