EPMware’s Real-Time Validation Helps Excellus BlueCross Blue Shield Protect Data Integrity

According to research conducted by Accenture¹, 88 percent of corporate data never gets analyzed. This means that in today’s data-dependent business environments, many large corporations—including insurance providers—aren’t getting any value from the massive volume of data they collect.

Accenture’s research also found that the main reasons these organizations aren’t extracting value from their most valuable asset are siloed data, poor integration, and lack of governance.

Data analysts in large companies spend as much as 80 percent of their time searching for, cleaning, and preparing data for analysis—and only 20 percent of their time actually analyzing it.

Why Metadata Matters in the Insurance Industry

These statistics are particularly troublesome for insurance companies that leverage data analytics and intelligence to provide services, assess risk, and prevent fraud.

Properly governed and validated metadata is an essential part of this equation because it helps ensure that insurers have accurate data to drive decisions and policies regarding premiums, eligibility, and claims.

Effective metadata management is a key factor in helping insurance providers implement successful data governance programs that provide essential information about where the data comes from, where the data is stored, and who has access to the data and why.

Yet, despite the importance of accurate metadata and its role in maintaining data integrity, many organizations continue to employ manual processes to manage their metadata.

EPMware had the opportunity to help a large insurance provider transform its metadata management approach from manual, error-prone change requests into one that uses our automated workflow and real-time validation capabilities.

The Excellus BlueCross BlueShield Success Story

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield serves its customers by providing financial strength, effective cost control, ease of use, and a commitment to health improvement.

However, inefficient request management processes were making it difficult for the Excellus team to ensure the quality of the data they needed to support these goals.

Prior to implementing EPMware, Excellus used a manual ticketing system to handle change requests. This process required users to go through several steps and make changes in multiple places. Each of the changes then had to be manually validated, which made the process even more time-consuming and increased the risk of errors.

The Excellus finance team relied on several Hyperion business and financial solutions, including Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Planning for data modeling, analytics, and planning.

When the insurer upgraded from Hyperion 11.1.2.4 to Hyperion 11.2.x, they knew EPMA would no longer be available. So, rather than switch to DRM Lite or stay in “classic” mode—which isn’t built for efficiency or maintaining metadata integrity—Excellus began looking for a metadata management solution that solved its biggest challenges.

The team defined three core requirements for their new metadata management platform:

• Audit trails to track who made changes, when they were made, and whether they deployed successfully.

• Automation to speed up key processes within its change request workflow.

• Validations and derivations to help protect metadata accuracy, consistency, and fitness for use.

EPMware Delivers Instant Results Out of the Box

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield selected EPMware based on its direct deployment to Hyperion’s planning application and Essbase cubes as well as its dimension mapping capabilities. But features such as an easy-to-deploy automated workflow, real-time validation, and full visibility into the metadata request process really made EPMware stand out from the other solutions Excellus evaluated.

It took about six weeks to integrate, test, and roll out EPMware, and the finance team saw an immediate improvement in its metadata management processes.

For example, EPMware automatically routes and tracks hierarchy changes through the review, approval, and validation processes, then seamlessly publishes the changes to all subscribing applications at once. This eliminates the need to make manual changes in multiple places.

EPMware Validations Prevent Errors, Omissions, Inconsistencies, and Skipped Approvals

Insurance providers leverage data to provide services, set premiums, and identify fraud. Without accurate, reliable metadata, insurers risk making critical business decisions based on bad data.

EPMware’s real-time scripting engine validates the accuracy and completeness of metadata before it is deployed, ensuring Excellus BlueCross BlueShield’s compliance and data governance standards are enforced throughout the process so they can have full confidence in the quality of their data.

Want to learn more? Download the full Excellus BlueCross BlueShield success story here.

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¹ https://insuranceblog.accenture.com/heres-why-insurers-struggle-to-get-value-from-their-data