num Group, formerly UnumProv-

ident, is the industry leader in

disability income insurance and a top

provider of voluntary benefits, life and

long-term-care insurance products. The

firm employs nearly 10,000 people world-

wide and delivered $6.2 billion in total

customer benefits in 2006.

Today’s Unum was forged in a pair of

mergers. The first joined Provident and Paul

Revere in 1997. The second, just two years

later, merged the newly formed Provident

Companies with Unum Corporation. This

rapid convergence of three well-established

organizations created an industry power-

house on one hand and a thicket of

management and integration challenges

on the other, as each company had its own

set of operational systems and its own

approach to structuring business data.

Soon after the initial merger the com-

pany realized a data warehouse would be

beneficial to support data rationalization

and centralized reporting. “Our goal was

Integrated insight

U

Unum Group grows its Teradata Warehouse into an active platformfor effective management and responsive customer service. by Bill Tobey

TeradataMagazine.com

Photo

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CASE STUDY

Bob Dolmovich, vice president of businessintegration and data architecture, right,and Kyle Prescott, database administrator,share how foresight for future use of theTeradata Warehouse allows it to fill verydifferent roles at Unum Group.

PAGE 1 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378

to develop consistent performance metrics

across the combined companies,” recalls

Bob Dolmovich, vice president of busi-

ness integration and data architecture.

“We needed to be able to track sales and

a variety of other activity and profitability

measures in order to understand more

about our product performance and our

distribution channels.”

Building on a provenand scalable technologyIn choosing the company’s data warehouse

platform, Dolmovich and his team made a

strategic decision to build on proven tech-

nology. “We had enough business issues to

deal with that we didn’t want to be wrest-

ling with technical issues too,” he explains.

“So we went looking for a scalable solution

that may have been overkill for the data

volumes that Provident and Paul Revere

required at the time. We really wanted

to ensure that the technology would meet

our future performance needs. In hind-

sight, given the additional mergers that

were just down the road, it was exactly

the right decision.”

In fact, the second merger—of Provi-

dent and Unum—was significantly larger

in scale and raised the integration stakes

commensurately. Ultimately, the scope of

the combined companies drove a decision

to blend all lines of business on an expanded

Teradata Warehouse. In mid-2000 the firm

launched a major platform upgrade and

accelerated the efforts to assimilate and

rationalize data from most of its 34 policy

and claim administration systems, which

included a wide range of mainframe, mid-

range and distributed source systems.

The original data warehouse platform

was a two-node system. Early applications

for the larger data warehouse included

a wide range of monthly performance

analytics—everything from claim trends

and premium trends and persistency—to

daily sales reporting. Another priority was

consolidating and integrating the many

isolated and often redundant stores of

customer data located in the various oper-

ational systems. To address this challenge,

Unum implemented a Web services-based

customer data integration hub, which in

conjunction with the Teradata Warehouse

provides customer data aggregation,

standardization and quality control.

Evolving to active enterprise intelligenceAs integration and rationalization efforts

enabled by the data warehouse established

a solid basis for enterprise reporting and

performance analysis, Unum began exper-

imenting with more frequent data loads

and more active, operational business

applications. “In many cases, after

bringing policy and claim data into the

warehouse for actuarial purposes, we were

able to enhance the feeds or the timing

of the feeds and ask ourselves what else

we might do with the data,” Dolmovich

recalls. “Once you’ve done the initial hard

work of accessing, transforming, loading

and scrubbing your data, it’s really easy

to get extra value from it with relatively

little extra effort.”

Unum’s more active applications vary

widely in the company’s business focus and

in the types of workloads placed on the data

warehouse. Two notable examples illustrate

the diversity and scope of these applications:

> Individual disability valuation is the

actuarial process of modeling aggregate

policy values and the financial reserves

required under law to meet projected

claim obligations. Unum actuaries

developed a more accurate and flexible

CASE STUDY

Solution benefits

> Standardized management reportingand key performance indicators

> Improved capital allocation: Dailypolicy and claim valuation providesmore detailed and accurate reserveforecasts

> Improved customer service: Customercalls handled within target responsetimes increased from 60% to 95%

> Improved labor efficiency: Faster callrouting and simple query automationallowed 30 call center representativesto be reassigned to higher-value tasks

“In many cases, after bringing policy and claim datainto the warehouse for actuarial purposes, we wereable to enhance the feeds or the timing of the feeds andask ourselves what else we might do with the data.”

—Bob Dolmovich, Unum Group

PAGE 2 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378

process for managing nearly

$12 billion in reserves by using the

data warehouse to capture policy and

claim change data from eight separate

administration systems and recal-

culating reserve values daily. The

calculation outputs alone occupy 750

million rows in the data warehouse.

Business impacts include faster and

simpler monthly closing, improved

Sarbanes-Oxley controls and hard-

dollar return on investment (ROI) that

the company will describe only as 10 to

12 times its original projections.

> Interactive voice response (IVR) and

Web self-service was a complex project

aimed at improving the level of service

offered to customers and brokers.

Active data warehouse queries were

used to support three separate types

of interactions via three different

customer and partner service systems:

• Intelligent call routing at Unum’s

customer service call center

• Self-service claim status inquiries

on a customer-facing IVR system

• Underwriting status inquiries on

a broker-facing Web portal

Each of these applications resulted

in a new active workload of tactical

queries against the data warehouse.

Additionally, hourly data loads from

the various underwriting systems were

implemented to provide near real-

time visibility at the broker portal.

In turn, these instances of active en-

terprise intelligence have significantly

improved the level of service Unum

provides to customers and partners,

while substantially reducing the cost

of delivery.

One data warehouse, multiple rolesAs the tactical workloads associated

with Unum’s more active applications

have grown in volume and importance,

proactive workload management and

monitoring have become a necessity. “Our

current workloads run about 45 percent

batch ETL [extract, transform and load]

processes, 35 percent ad hoc and 25

percent tactical queries from the Web ser-

vices and call center applications,” explains

Kyle Prescott, Teradata database admin-

istrator at Unum.

“We use Priority Scheduler to segment

workloads and Teradata Manager to monitor

the system,” Prescott continues, “and we

run canary queries. Our philosophy is to let

people access the data, but to watch them

closely. We’re not using any denial-type

software, but we do run lists of top-100 CPU

users and top queries from a capacity per-

spective. We try to stay on top of that so we

can protect those tactical queries. They’re

not a large part of the overall workload, but

we think of them as our golden egg.” This

use of Priority Scheduler is especially im-

portant considering that the average query

volume is greater than 10 million queries

per month with peak volume as high as

18 million queries per month.

Unum’s Teradata Warehouse now fills

two very different roles for the com-

pany—one is historical and analytical,

the other is active and operational. “It

is certainly the pre-eminent business

intelligence platform for our U.S.

business, and it’s the tool of choice for

business analytics, pricing, valuation,

reserve modeling and forecasting—all

traditional roles,” Dolmovich explains,

“but it also has an increasingly important

role in customer and partner service that

it is able to fill because of its stability and

24x7 performance.

“And the Teradata Warehouse has given

us something else: a fresh model for data-

base management. Because we started this

system from scratch just 10 years ago, with

the benefit of prior experience and really

good tools, we’ve done a much better job

of clearly defining and controlling our

data. It’s a model for data management

and governance practice that we’re now

taking out of the business intelligence

space and back into our application

development processes for transactional

and operational systems.” T

Bill Tobey is a senior technology writer at Ford

Sherman, a communication services agency.

Behind the solution: Unum Group

Database: Teradata Database V2R6.0.2

Server: 10-node Teradata 5450 Server

Users: 2,500+ internal business users and thousands of additional broker and customer users via portal and call center applications

DBAs: 3 (2 full time, 1 part time)

Data Model: Third Normal Form

Operating System: UNIX MP-RAS

Storage: Spinning disk: 29TB. Customer data space: 7.9TB.Actual data: 3.4TB.

Teradata Utilities: BTEQ, MultiLoad, FastLoad, Teradata Active System Management,Teradata Manager, Teradata Priority Scheduler and Teradata TPump

Tools/Applications: Teradata Warehouse Miner and products from Business Objects,Cognos and Hyperion

Visit TeradataMagazine.com toread Kyle Prescott’s article onUnum Group’s successful useof Teradata’s VPN for support.

TOnline

PAGE 3 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5378