How can you manage your SAP data effectively in an evolving insurance industry?

With the chaos created by recent events such as Storm Floris, Storm Eowyn and Storm Dexter, insurance is top of mind for many people around the world. Global events such as climate change are causing upheaval, and are reshaping the insurance industry, amplifying insurance risk model and data complexities.

For companies in the insurance industry running SAP, managing their data effectively in a changing world – while also keeping their SAP systems a manageable size – can be extremely difficult.

Data demands in insurance companies

Insurance is an inherently data-driven industry, with insurance companies capturing and analysing vast amounts of customers’ data, as well as using data to inform risk assessments, improve their product development, and make accurate underwriting decisions. Insurance companies have to collect huge amounts of data to meet their customers rising expectations, mitigate risks and remain competitive.

The complexity of running SAP in the insurance industry

Of course, running SAP systems in the insurance industry adds to the complexity. The Insurance Industry Solution for SAP leverages Financial Services Collections and Disbursements (FSCD), and creates high data volumes, especially because of frequently changing customer data with new dunning runs, payments, etc. All the payments create a large number of transactions in the system. The industry solution also integrates with Contract Accounting (CA), resulting in a complex web of data, all flowing from a single Business Partner.

When testing or troubleshooting, a complete history is required for test cases, so that balances and credit checking are correct. This typically means that insurance companies rely on frequent system copies with large volumes of data.

Insights from an expert

We spoke to Lars Fuchs to get his insights into the complexities of the insurance industry, and how EPI-USE Labs’ solutions can help. As Managing Director for Central & Eastern Europe, Lars has many years of experience in helping clients to optimise their SAP landscapes.

Why would insurance companies need to create leaner SAP clients?

"In our experience, insurance companies need to be able to build lean clients with a time-slice of posting documents and accounting documents, but with all the master data and payment plan data for customers, which is required for accurate testing. Doing this reduces the volume in test and development clients, allowing more flexibility in the landscape, and simplifies the refresh process for Basis teams, making the outcome much more predictable."

How can insurance companies create smaller test or sandbox environments?

"With Client Sync, part of the EPI-USE Labs' Data Sync Manager (DSM) Suite, you can create massively smaller test or sandbox environments for your DevOps, for example. So insurance companies can create more than just one sandbox or test system, without losing the ability to test the data. You can still test full-fledged processes; the data is still consistent. It’s very useful to be able to copy whole clients of SAP, but still slice the data, so you can keep your sandbox or test environment nice and small to optimize the cost and the data footprint of that system."

Can companies in the insurance industry optimise their S/4HANA systems?

"Many insurance companies would like to optimize their systems in an S/4HANA context, and perhaps to move selectively to S/4HANA to get rid of outdated data in their systems.

If you need more selective data transfers, for example, certain contract account data or certain customer data from a business partner, then Object Sync – also part of the Data Sync Manager (DSM) Suite – allows you to select your business partner or even contract account and copy all the related data of that contract account to a non-production environment.

With Object Sync, there are a number of Insurance specific objects and a Scenario object which allows selection by specific ‘Insurance Object’ keys and collects all related data – such as Business Partner, Contract Account, Payment Plans, Partner FS-CD data, FICA postings – so that the exact situation for that account can be set up in seconds in testing environments. This is invaluable for Production support issues, as well as better unit testing in development systems, regression and integration testing in higher systems."

Why is it important for insurance companies to mask sensitive data?

"Insurance companies collect a vast amount of sensitive customer information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII). It’s essential that any solution has the ability to obfuscate this data – not only to make sure that customer information is protected, but also to remain compliant with global data privacy legislation, like the GDPR, and other relevant regulations.

With Data Secure, we offer a very powerful tool to obfuscate sensitive data, and still keep the integrity of the data so you can still rely on the data quality for your testing. Sensitive customer information, names, addresses and bank details can be masked as part of both the Client Sync and Object Sync process. Alternatively, existing test systems can be masked as a stand-alone with Data Secure, leveraging the same masking policies."

Managing a SAP system in the insurance industry? Explore how you can reduce your system size and protect your sensitive data.