CASE STUDY
BackOffice Associates is
a leading expert in data
migration.
Back Office reduces the risk, cost and
complexity for Zurich Insurance.
Introduction
Founded in Switzerland in 1872, Zurich Insurance
Group (Zurich) is a leading multi-line insurer, delivering
a wide range of general insurance and life insurance
products and services to a broad range of business and
private clients. With over 55,000 employees operating
in more than 170 countries, Zurich has three core
business segments — General Insurance, Global Life,
and Farmers. To reduce costs and improve efficiency
Zurich embarked on a Finance Transformation
Program that involved consolidating 23 legacy SAP
systems into a single production instance. As a multiyear, multi-wave program Zurich needed a reusable
migration solution and methodology for future waves.
Main Goals:
• Smoothly migrate 23+ different ERP systems
to a single, central SAP FI financial accounting,
controlling and 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
re-using business rules and technical data mapping
BackOffice
Zurich selected BackOffice based on its proven record
of success with complex information governance
projects. Zurich saw how the BackOffice approach
reduced risks and controlled costs through automation,
pre-built 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.
Best Practices
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 tool set that could better
identify, harmonise and remediate these differences,
and govern data quality in the target solution.
As the program involved deploying multiple waves
in parallel, Zurich needed an easier, repeatable,
traceable and fully auditable migration process.
BackOffice offered exactly what Zurich needed.
Through proactive data assessments and active
management of the data cleansing and reconciliation
process, BackOffice helped Zurich enhance and
govern all aspects of data migration. 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. This measurably increased data accuracy
and lowered risk as we got closer to production
migration,” said Andrea Smith, SAP Convergence IT
Program Manager, Zurich Insurance.
Future Road Map
Zurich’s global data migration project will continue
into 2017, a