COPIC
COPIC Insurance Realizes Cost Savings Using the Informatica Data Integration Platform
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“It is critical that any time we acquire technology products, they must contribute immediately and substantially to our productivity. The Informatica data integration platform has done that. Ease of development, accessible metadata, solid performance, and reliable execution has made Informatica the first choice for any of our data integration challenges.”
— Mark Stieg, Senior Technical Systems Designer, COPIC Companies
Fast Facts
Customer
COPIC Insurance, the leading provider of liability insurance to physicians, hospitals, and medical entities in Colorado
Challenge
Migrating from a legacy mainframe system to a client server environment with limited resources and under time pressures
Informatica Solution
Informatica PowerCenter
Benefits
- Completed migration project in record time
- 50 percent cost savings over a custom solution
- Strong built in documentation capabilities
Nuts and Bolts
- Data Integration: Informatica PowerCenter
- Sources: Oracle, legacy system, flat files
- Target: Oracle
- Platform: Sun Solaris
COPIC Insurance Company provides medical professional liability insurance to physicians, hospitals, and medical entities such as managed-care plans and county health departments in Colorado and Nebraska.
The Challenge
Many organizations have begun the difficult process of migrating legacy mainframe systems to client/server environments. This transition is being driven by the need for faster, easier access to business information and to react to competitive pressures and changing market dynamics more quickly and effectively.
With limited resources and under a very aggressive implementation plan, COPIC was looking for a cost-effective solution to help it migrate from a legacy HP 3000 mainframe system to an Oracle platform. Since the company did not have any people experienced with Oracle SQL scripting or procedures, it was looking for a migration solution that was flexible, easy to learn, and effective to manage and implement.
Upon completion of its migration project, COPIC knew it needed to build a data warehouse for operational and strategic reporting. Building a data warehouse was critical because the transactional design of the company's new applications involved over 700 tables that were very difficult to query directly against because of inconsistencies inherent in data storage systems.
The Solution
COPIC selected the Informatica data integration platform because of its flexibility in providing both pre and post-session support, ease of use, and industry leadership position. And by using this platform, COPIC successfully completed its system migration project in record time.
On the heels of its successful migration project, COPIC has begun its data warehouse initiative and is using Informatica to extract and analyze risk management, customer, and product data. By consolidating data from a variety of systems into a central Oracle data warehouse and storing historical information, COPIC is able to meet traditional reporting requirements while evolving to real-time strategic analysis of data. Also, through its data warehouse, COPIC is improving its ability to quickly identify trends and respond to changing market and economic conditions, achieving its continued goals of excellent customer service and solid financial performance.
The Results
Successful completion of legacy migration project in only nine months
Most legacy migration projects of this scale take an average of two years to complete but COPIC was able to complete the project in nine months with only two developers. They quickly and successfully completed the migration project because of the strong performance gains and improvements in development productivity that came with purchasing Informatica PowerCenter. Specifically, COPIC leveraged the Informatica Server Manager and Scheduler to significantly improve productivity. The Server Manager provided a full audit trail of everything executed and robust run-time feedback, while the Informatica Scheduler was used to manage and launch sessions (including external programs) automatically—instead of manually.
Cost savings / Return on investment
By visually defining mappings and transformations through the easy to use Informatica Designer GUI, COPIC has been able to significantly reduce data warehouse maintenance and support costs and quickly train developers. On the migration project alone, the company has realized at least a 50 percent cost savings over what a custom solution could offer, and their Informatica solution paid for itself in less than two years.
Strong built in documentation capabilities
As a result of the PowerCenter self-documentation capability, COPIC has been able to track and document all transformations in a central and easily accessible location. With a custom-coded solution, the company would need to spend time implementing a documentation tracking system to document all development work, which would have taken up both resources and time.
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