Company Background
This large, Fortune 50 organization offers a wide range of health and insurance plans to individuals, families, seniors, service members, and veterans across the United States.
Objectives
The nature of the company’s business required hundreds of users to run processes on a daily basis. Analytics processing took several hours to complete, and wasted valuable time, money, and resources. They needed a way to reduce their processing time so that users could conduct more data analysis, not data wrangling.
Resolutions
Destiny Corporation evaluated their configuration and designed a new architecture to support SAS/Grid execution with a new MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) environment. Processing time was reduced from ten hours to less than one minute.
Benefits
Their new MPP environment successfully supports all analytics users and can process queries in less than one minute.
Company Background
This large Canadian business provides a wide range of travel, life, health, home, auto, and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients.
Objectives
The company had become dependent upon sophisticated analytics ETL and model processing, however, processing times typically exceeded ten or more hours. This was preventing data analysis to be done in a timely matter.
Resolutions
Destiny Corporation reviewed the existing architecture and design that currently supported the organization. We determined I/O bottlenecks to be the main contributor to excessive run times, and designed a new architecture with an MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) solution. Analytics processing was reduced from many hours to two minutes.
Benefits
With the new solution in place, this organization is now capable of real time analysis.
Company Background
Founded in Hartford, Connecticut, this Fortune 50 health insurance organization is committed to providing individuals, employers, and health care professionals with innovative benefits, products, and services.
Objectives
This organization had multiple analytic environments and applications with users that did not have an interest in changing the existing code. They needed their mainframe processing time reduced in order to run faster queries.
Resolutions
Destiny Corporation was brought in to review the current mainframe infrastructure. Improvements were made directly to the mainframe logic without the need for code modifications. This resulted in improved speed, and mainframe processing time was decreased from 22 hours to 2 minutes.
Benefits
The organization can now focus on data analysis rather than processing times.
Company Background
This company is a leading international insurance organization, serving customers in more than 100 countries and jurisdictions. They serve commercial, institutional, and individual customers through one of the most extensive worldwide property-casualty networks of any insurer. In addition, they are leading providers of life insurance and retirement services in the United States.
Objectives
The organization relied on hundreds of analytics users who created mission critical statistical models. These models were being housed on inefficient network storage and required a more robust infrastructure.
Resolutions
Destiny Corporation conducted multiple-day onsite design sessions with key client stakeholders. Subsequently, we designed and implemented an MPP environment that included new servers for Dev, Test, QA and Prod, as well as new storage. This created a stable and reliable infrastructure capable of housing the company’s hundreds of analytics users. Analytics processing times went from multiple hours to minutes.
Benefits
The business is now capable of supporting hundreds of analytics users with a stable and well-designed infrastructure, allowing more time for data analysis and less time spent running analytics processes.
Company Background
This large healthcare Insurance company is independent, not-for-profit, and provides a nationwide association for its subscribers.
Objectives
The organization relied on numerous analytics processes that were being done in a Teradata environment supported by informatics. These analytics processes were incredibly time consuming, some running as long as 22 hours. By the time our services were requested, data analysis had become a long and laborious undertaking.
Resolutions
Destiny Corporation evaluated the documented areas in which analytics processing had become a challenge. Upon completion of our assessment, we designed an MPP solution for the analytics workload. With the new MPP environment in place, analytics processing times decreased from 22 hours to 31 seconds.
Benefits
The company can now run multiple analytics processes in less time, allowing more time to spend on analysis.
Company Background
This organization is a leader in health care financing and has served as a not-for-profit agency for over fifty years. It has a network of independent, locally operated companies.
Objectives
The business is responsible for creating standard reports and graphs about plan utilization rates on a monthly basis. Six analysts dedicated numerous hours each week towards this effort. They were using a combination of software, both in the mainframe and Windows environments. Many manual processes existed which were prone to error, including the transfer of data between several different software packages.
Resolutions
We built an intelligent software application, which operates in a client server environment between Windows NT server and MVS that automatically determines the reporting periods. This application extracts data from their DB2 warehouse, cleans, analyzes, and summarizes it to produce web and print based standard reports and graphs. This is one continuous process, eliminating the need for any other software application. An administrative person runs the job once a month. They click on a front-end GUI application and the reports and graphs are automatically published.
Benefits
The company used to print all of their reports and graphs on paper and then route them to the various doctors and providers participating in their plans. Our new application freed up the six analysts from having to engage in manual processes each month. By automating the process, it was made accessible to the correct individuals on a real-time basis. The application prints reports and graphs in a web-based environment, using HTML and Adobe PDF formats and automatically publishes the information on their corporate Intranet.
THIRD LARGEST HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY IN THE U.S.
SITUATION
- 1000 SAS users
- 12 people (SAS experts assigned) just trying
to clean up programs of others - Contention caused by concurrent SAS
jobs running - Long running SAS processes
- Could not scale environment, additional
servers and storage could not solve
the problem
HOW DESTINY HELPED
- Redesigned processes
- Worked with IT on throughput
- Helped customer migrate to new environment, SAS/Grid
- Went to new storage and servers
BUSINESS OUTCOME
- Eliminated contention with SAS/Grid, which offered a queueing option for processing
- 400% faster running SAS jobs
- Reduced the number of SAS servers from
four to one, a 75% decrease
