German Health Insurance Provider Optimizes Data Management With SAS(R)

CARY, North Carolina, Feb. 28 -- SAS Institute, a business analytics software and services provider, issued the following news release:

ARAG Krankenversicherungs-AG, a German health insurance provider, has established a central data warehouse with SAS, the leader in analytics, to supply all the company's organizational units with the data they require. Using a portal developed with SAS(R) Enterprise BI Server, departments at the insurer can access comprehensive analyses.

"Data warehousing is an ongoing process, not one-time project," said Wolfgang Neuber, project lead at ARAG IT GmbH. "Using SAS, we've built a central platform that allows us to distribute information according to our needs. That gives us a solid foundation for our medium-term and long-term business planning."

ARAG Krankenversicherungs-AG has relied on SAS solutions for 20 years. Past projects include a joint effort resulting in the successful migration of the company's enterprise wide reporting system to a web-based solution in addition to other innovative IT projects focusing on business process optimization, automated processing and product profitability. Consequently, ARAG Krankenversicherungs-AG had already established a foundation for fact-based controlling.

With SAS, the company now has a consistent, centralized data warehouse, making it even more effective at reaching business decisions in the areas of planning, analysis and controlling. The SAS portal distributes automatically generated information to the corresponding departments. Ad hoc queries receive fast answers, and no programming is required. In addition, the company has created a single version of truth by standardizing terms, pre-defining reporting standards, and establishing comparable and structured metrics. Another overall benefit for the health insurance carrier is the high-data quality that the automated monitoring mechanisms ensure.

Custom access control through a central permissions management system ensures that each user gets precisely the information that they need, such as statistics on sales targets, rate increases or telephony.

"Especially in the insurance industry, being able to access all the data in a consistent way is so important - data quality is a huge topic," explained Kai Fahlenbock, Director for Sales Insurance in German, Australia and Switzerland at SAS. "We're pleased to have this opportunity to build a comprehensive data management structure for ARAG Krankenversicherungs-AG. It will put the company in the best possible position to make key determinations - whether they're looking at customer relationships, accounting issues or strategic planning."