Bupa carries out SWIFT migration

UK health insurer, Bupa, has completed a large scale migration of data as part of the consolidation of legacy applications onto SWIFT, its new unified administrative platform.

The data from nine legacy systems migrated included information on 12.7m members, nearly 100,000 companies and 21m claims. All data was successfully migrated and accurately transferred in just 31 hours.

SWIFT, which has been under development for four years replaces 32 legacy systems with one. As a result of the migration project. Swift will be used in conjunction with the PeopleSoft financial accounting system across Bupa’s UK Membership business.

Dr Natalie-Jane Macdonald, managing director of Bupa UK Membership "We can now offer customers real flexibility, more choice and tailored cover at the press of a button. From a rolling excess, to variable cancer cover or supporting bespoke referral routes from Occupational Health – all of this becomes possible now. ”

SWIFT will also give Bupa a single view of its customers. Each customer will now have just one record, enabling Bupa to gain a better understanding of its customers and the ability to serve them more effectively.

To carry out the project Bupa used Kognitio’s FastTest technology to audit and account for the whole project for Financial Services Authority (FSA) and HMRC Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) approval, without requiring a huge expenditure of time and personnel.

The initial estimate for end-to-end migration processing was 11 days. Kognitio say they were able to help BUPA reduce this to 31 hours, allowing the migration to be completed over a weekend, minimising disruption to Bupa.

“We were very aware that consolidation of so many systems was a risky strategy and that the data migration element presented significant challenges and pitfalls”, said Steve Felton, director of business change, Bupa.

“For the new systems to be implemented successfully, it was imperative that all the relevant customer and financial information was transferred to the new applications accurately,” added Felton. “With the migration of data from flat file, mainframe technology to the multi-level hierarchies of relational database systems together with the multiple mappings required to transform data from source to target systems across different lines of business, this was an incredibly complex project.”

Working in a joint team with Bupa, Kognitio was responsible for designing the approach to the data migration and all aspects of the delivery including the analysis of the source system data, the design, build, implementation, testing and auditing of the data migration process.

Some 16,000 mappings and half a million lines of transformation code were generated to convert 700m rows of source data into 2.5 billion rows of target data in the required format for the effective operation of the new applications.

In order to gain FSA and HMRC approval for the project, Bupa had to account for data being transferred accurately and in its entirety without loss or corruption. The auditing process implemented by Kognitio proved that the data had been transferred accurately from the source to the target systems and provided visibility of the data at the required level to enable both the FSA and HMRC to sign off the implementation at the first attempt.

FastTest uses Kognitio’s WX2 high-performance analytical database technology to speed up the entire data migration testing and auditing process, typically one of the most labour-intensive stages of a data migration project.

FastTest also facilitated the data checks which enabled extremely large volumes of data to be validated as part of the migration to ensure that the migrated data would load into the target database in a timescale to meet the required migration window.

Through a data cleansing process designed by Kognitio, Bupa was able to identify anomalies in the legacy data and clean it up prior to migration to the target system so that it was of greater value to the business.

“A high percentage of data migration projects fail but we were confident that our tools and experience with similar projects would enable us to meet the challenges we faced at Bupa,” said Roger Llewellyn, CEO at Kognitio.

Bupa has developed a microsite including a blog and discussion forum and will be hosting events over the coming months to capture intermediary and broker feedback.