Health Insurance Provider Utilizes QuerySurge to Dramatically Improve Data Quality

A major health insurer was faced with validating large data sets being transformed from flat files, Oracle and SQL Server. Validating these large data sets could not be accomplished with traditional strategies such as minus queries, stare & compare, or Excel comparison. Sampling of result sets was done in the past, however data defects were flowing into their production environments. A better solution needed to be found in order to improve the quality of the data they maintain for federal regulations, marketing and pricing purposes. The data quality improvement had to be accomplished in less time and without adding additional testing resources.

Background

The company has excellent skilled QA resources and was already efficient at using automated testing tools (HP’s QuickTest Pro and Quality Center). They investigated Data Warehouse testing tools and chose QuerySurge after extensive analysis and hands-on testing with the free QuerySurge trial offering.

Challenges

• improve data quality
• shorten the test cycle time
• reduce the number of testing resources
• run tests at off-hours
• disseminating test results on a timely basis

Solution

The company investigated data quality testing tools and found that QuerySurge was the best fit for them. They have aggressively applied QuerySurge successfully to more than 50 projects. Many of these projects execute QuerySurge nightly using the automated scheduling and email notification features.

Some key metrics from implementing QuerySurge are:

• A total of 7,000 query pairs (SQL extract and compare statements) have been developed
• Many of the data sets contain up to 100 million rows and 200 columns
• Defects discovered using QuerySurge include:
• Missing rows
• Data where the planned transformations were not applied
• Rounding issues
• Concatenation issues

QuerySurge has helped senior management understand and address data issues related to federal regulations, marketing programs, financials and claims payment in a timely and cost effective manner. Also, QuerySurge has improved the quality of testing results by expanding the amount of data that can be sampled exponentially (many cases 100% of the data is validated).

Additional key benefits include:

• reduced testing cycle time
• decrease in testing resources
• A more organized and process-oriented testing team
• faster ramp-up time for new team members
• adaptation for business users (through the Data Wizards)
• unattended nightly test execution
• a better understanding of their data