Zurich Insurance
Finance transformation program reduces risk, cost, and complexity.
Background
To reduce costs and improve efficiency, Zurich Insurance Group embarked on a Finance Transformation Program that involved consolidating 23 legacy SAP systems into a single production instance. As a multi-year, multi-wave program Zurich needed a reusable migration solution and methodology for future waves.
The company
In its evolution into a global insurer, Zurich developed or acquired a large number of ERP systems. While these tools were designed to meet local regulatory or financial reporting requirements, they often used differing data standards. Through migration with a bespoke tool set, this made it difficult to identify conflicting business rules or create effective and reusable reconciliation reports, making reuse between country deployments or for data cleansing impossible. To remedy this, Zurich decided to implement an integrated data migration toolset that could better identify, harmonize and remediate these differences, and govern data quality in the target solution
"We can now clearly show our business users how and where their legacy data would result in an error when put through the transformations and validations of the target system.”
Project goals
- Smoothly migrate 23+ different ERP systems to a single, central SAP FI (financial accounting)/CO (controlling) and BW (business warehousing) solution
- Quickly and reliably cleanse and integrate data from these legacy systems into the new target system
- Meet timeline and budget requirements
- Improve data quality and implement a sustainable data governance capability
- Implement best practices across projects including reusing business rules and technical data mapping
As the program involved deploying multiple waves in parallel, Zurich needed an easier, repeatable, traceable and fully auditable migration process. Syniti offered exactly what Zurich needed — automation, prebuilt content, reusable templates and expert services. Through proactive data assessments and active management of the data cleansing and reconciliation process, Syniti helped Zurich enhance and govern all aspects of data migration.
With our support, local data migration leads now have a reliable tool and 24/7 access to useful reports that help business users correct (or exclude) rules and value mappings well in advance of final go-live approvals. This ability to collaborate has resulted in a dramatic improvement in data quality and predictable data migration
results. “We worked with local leads to maximize the use of key business resources and to resolve complex questions at the earliest point in time. This measurably increased data accuracy and lowered risk as we got closer to production migration,” said Smith.
"We worked with local leads to maximize the use of key business resources and to resolve complex questions at the earliest point in time. This measurably increased data accuracy and lowered risk as we got closer to production migration."
Future road map
Zurich’s global data migration project will continue into 2017, and they have just completed deployments to Australia and China at mid-year — something they previously avoided due to the complexity of reconciling data for a partial year. “We now have a predictable, reliable toolset, team and process that can be reused to maintain data quality in production, and can be leveraged by other data quality, cleansing and governance initiatives,” added Smith
Implementation highlights
- Significantly reduced migration implementation time
- Re-usable best practices and target-design-driven validation reporting
- Ongoing visibility into data quality improvements based on reporting and remediation validations
- Real cost savings generated by reducing external consultant spend
- Accurate, business-ready data to support business-critical applications
- Confidence in Syniti’s delivery of strategy, architecture, audit, cleansing, and additional data related functions
"We now have a predictable, reliable toolset, team and process that can be reused to maintain data quality in production, and can be leveraged by other data quality, cleansing and governance initiatives."
Why Syniti was selected
Zurich selected Syniti based on their proven record of success with complex information governance projects. Zurich saw how the Syniti approach reduced risks and controlled costs through automation, prebuilt content, reusable templates, and expert services. Additionally, by leveraging the business rules enforced throughout the migration process, Zurich is now also able to achieve sustainable data quality.
The results
- Using proven data assessments, core tools and resources, harmonized load cycles, and standard reconciliation reports, Syniti helped Zurich deliver consistently successful data migration results, improve data quality, and control costs.
- All general ledger and non-general ledger data was reconciled and signed off with higher than 99% accuracy
- In the UK, during an 8-month period, Zurich cleansed 14 years’ worth of legacy data across 3 business units — 230 million data items with more than 99.9% accuracy
- For Zurich Mexico Santander — a joint venture with Santander Bank — Zurich migrated all legacy data from multiple source systems without a direct connection
- In 2014, Zurich spent 7% less on data migration efforts, compared to 2013