Duck Creek Platform Data Migration Challenges - 12 Ways to Mitigate and Deliver Efficiency

Abstract

Every business face data challenges. By selecting Duck Creek Technologies'—a suite of P&C insurance software that is configurable, scalable, and upgradable, from an IT service provider that has the industry expertise and a proven track record of success can help you focus on your business and not worry about the data and implementation issues. IT service providers play a crucial role in implementing and configuring the Duck CreekP&C software suite for a better end-user experience.

Bumpier Ride of Legacy PAS Migration

Legacy PAS platform migration to modern Commercial Off-The-Self (COTS) such as Duck Creek PAS platform, brings new challenges to insurers such as managing new infrastructure, new system interfaces/integrations, new user interfaces, new workflows, and lots of learning for both IT and business users. Modern platforms enable insurers to quickly expand their business with launch of new products, continue with existing products, and serve existing customers. Serving existing customers demands migrating existing product configurations and customer’s policy data from legacy to a new platform. Data (product configurations and policy information) migration has to ensure that all legacy data with transactional history should be available in the new platform seamlessly, ensuring tight coupling of legacy data with the modern platform.

Navigating through Data Challenges

While implementing Duck Creek PAS platform for particularly large businesses on legacy or clients in business for decades, we have seen insurers have encountered challenges with migrated data both during initial migration and also during subsequent transactions. Though Duck Creek platform is robust, flexible, scalable enough to handle all sort of legacy data, these challenges are mostly attributed to oversight during due diligence of business requirements and configuration of Duck Creek platform.

The illustration below outlines some of the challenges we experienced particularly with reference to policy data:

These data challenges often lead to issues, which will have impact on business efficiency of insurers i.e. policies not getting processed, outputs not getting generated for insured, and systems getting out of balance for premium (PAS, Billing, EDW out of sync).

At Coforge, we help our clients' overcome these potential data challenges. We have devised efficient processes best suited for proactive and reactive solutions approaches, involving all stages of product implementation, from requirement management to configuration to resolving production issues.

One of the critical stages in platform implementation is post-production support, where insurers needs to get policies processed in a time-bound manner to service insureds and agents. Moreover, that is the stage, which needs right processes and right skilled resources to ensure running of business with defined business SLAs.

12-Point Approach for Best Outcomes

We have devised a specific approach backed by stringent processes, which is adequate to deal with policy data related challenges. The 12 key points of our approach to identify and resolve data challenges basis deep technology acumen and extensive prior experience with few of our existing client engagements are outlined below:

• Establish a SWAT team of DCT experts to analyze existing system data issues
• Use our proprietary Download/Replicate Prod Policies tool to download policies on Local dev environment for accurate data issue analysis
• Perform data analysis, create fix (for single/bulk policies), and test in dev environment
• Perform data analysis, create fix (for single/bulk policies), and test in dev environment
• Create IDO/Shred fixes (if required) to provide correct data to Enterprise Data Warehouse
• Move fix to UAT environment and validate fix to check impact on existing/current transaction(s)
• Move fix to Prod environment for business user validation and closure
• Create rollback scripts to avoid any adverse impact in production in case of any rollback
• Generate reports proactively to identify data issues for subsequent transactions
• Create retrospective fixes to cater business needs to resolve prior transactions
• Perform root cause analysis to suggest Duck Creek code remedies to avoid regeneration of issue
• Archive data fix/SQL scripts (as knowledge base) for knowledge retention and audit compliance
• Track issues with ticket management using standard ALM tools

Benefits Delivered

Our data fix approach/processes and Duck Creek expertise have yielded some tangible and immediate business benefits to our clients:

• Happy insureds/agents with faster resolution of policy related issues
• Timely policy issuance, faster premium charging/return
• Meeting compliance needs with premium balancing in all systems for Accounting
• Simplified business and compliance reporting
• Meeting IT Audit compliance for production data fixes
• Enable IT to meet business SLA on time
• Faster resolution; off cycle releases (daily) for data fixes (cut down waiting for regular release cycle)
• Automation to improve efficiency and ensure optimal resources utilization

About the Author

Amit Negi works as Duck Creek Technologies (DCT) Practice Lead at Coforge Ltd. He is a DCT SME, bringing over 17+ years of leadership experience in successfully managing and implementing DCT services for various clients across US geography. As part of the leadership team, he is driving Duck Creek Services offerings across all client engagements and building DCT competency and accelerators for organization. His vast DCT expertise has been instrumental in bringing quality, innovation, and earning client confidence in the project deliveries.