VBL: A Compliant Test Landscape
for Complex Insurance Processes
Using SAP® Test Data Migration
Server
Pictur
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Ver
sor
gung
sans
talt de
s Bunde
s und der L
änder (VBL
), K
arlsruhe
, German
y.
U
sed with permis
Company Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder (VBL) is Germany‘s largest
supplementary pension provider. Its SAP® ERP and SAP Customer Relationship
Management applications contain sensitive data and are tailored to manage
insurance processes via a specific data model and custom-developed applications.
VBL wanted to manage its complex test landscape using SAP Test Data Migration
Server software
to help ensure compliant, high-quality test data,
reduce
non-productive system size, protect sensitive data, and minimize administrative effort.
Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder (VBL)
Industry
Insurance
Products and Services
Public sector – occupational pensions
Web Site
www.vbl.de
SAP® Solutions
Implementation service for SAP Test Data Migration
Server software (insurance), including its “collector”
software
Executive overview Company
Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
VBL – occupational pension specialists
VBL has been providing public-sector occupational pensions for 85 years. It is the largest provider of supplementary pensions in Germany. Currently some 5,400 participating employers and about 4.4 million insured employees use VBL’s services. VBL manages more than €28.5 billion in employee and employer contributions.
VBL is one of the largest institutional capital investors in Germany. More than 1.2 million pensioners receive a supplementary pension from VBL alongside their state pension, amounting to about a €4.7 billion pay-out in supplementary pensions every year. VBL is the first port of call for the public sector when it comes to occupational pensions. The company advises and informs employees, pensioners, and employers alike.
1.2
million
Satisfied retirees benefiting from
Company Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
Up-to-date services for the public sector
VBL constantly develops its business to offer customers the best possible service. In the public sector, VBL operates in a very dynamic environment and must respond quickly to economic and demo-graphic developments, changing legal requirements, market trends, and customer preferences.
VBL offers flexible, innovative insurance products and supports customers in developing their own pension plans. The company provides different supplementary pension packages to keep up with current industry trends; many people in the public sector rely on a supplementary pension alongside the state pension negotiated in collective labor agreements. In addition to traditional occupational pension schemes VBL’s product portfolio includes voluntary insurance products.
As a public agency VBL must operate efficiently by keeping administrative costs low. VBL’s customers expect a secure investment strategy that ensures high, long-term returns, even when financial markets struggle and interest rates are low.
To ensure that VBL can continue to provide services with attractive conditions in the future, the company must innovate and be budget conscious. VBL constantly redefines and streamlines the maintenance and setup of the SAP solutions and landscapes, as well as its application-related processes to guarantee the best support for all VBL systems. These systems include nonproductive SAP software systems for testing, training, demos, and quality assurance purposes.
“It is very important for us to have a constant dialogue with our customers
and learn about their needs. This enables us to provide expert advice and
the very best service.”
Executive overview Company
Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
Engaging experts from the System
Landscape Optimization group
Throughout a previous project, VBL recognized it was essential to migrate its mainframe systems to a central SAP environment, reducing complexity and increasing efficiency. Jörg Müller, head of IT strategy at VBL says: “Since our system landscape is extremely complex, and we handle large amounts of data on a daily basis, a main requirement and major prerequisite is to ensure consistency across all processes and applications.”
Müller adds: “In the past it was very challenging to create and handle adequate test cases which cover our complex insurance solution. Since a typical insurance account holds more than 25 years of data history and numerous interdependencies, creating suitable and manageable test cases is becoming more difficult.”
“We have very high data standards and therefore we constantly refresh our test systems to ensure that we are always working with up-to-date information,” Müller says. “In addition, legal regulations require strict data protection and demand full data compli-ance. Due to these legal restrictions we, as a public enterprise, are bound to do all testing in a predefined test environment.”
VBL searched for highly automated functionality that would enable them to create test cases by copying a defined set of data from the productive environment. The System Landscape Optimization group offered VBL additional flexibility to build an object-based data model while integrating custom developments. The group’s services also helped VBL cover standard and nonstandard applications and let them completely anonymize data to achieve full data protection.
“SAP has been a strategic partner and trusted advisor
for VBL since 1982.”
Company Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
A high-quality test landscape supports
business operations
VBL opted for SAP Test Data Migration Server soft-ware (SAP TDMS ) and its “collector” softsoft-ware to build up test landscapes. The collector is dedicated software for object-oriented data selection through-out a whole system, even for industry solutions and customer relationship management systems. The software works in scenarios where no standard SAP TDMS solution is available. The data selection can start at any point within the data model and creates a consistent data set for each selected business object. The software can select any business object – including business partners, claims and damages, contract accounts, and insurance objects. Starting with selected objects, the software identifies within the model all the dependent data that must be transferred to ensure full consistency of all business processes.
As a first step, the SAP experts thoroughly analyzed VBL’s system for integrating the company’s specific insurance solution into the SAP TDMS data model. The System Landscape Optimization group’s team executed the first object-oriented data selection based on the analysis results and successfully migrated the data to the VBL test environment. The project scope encompassed SAP applications such as management of business partner financial data, collections and disbursements, claims management, and VBL custom-developed applications including special human capital management functionality for payments, candidacy, and bonus systems.
“The SAP experts understood the complexity and interdependencies of our
SAP applications and achieved the ‘scrambling’ effect to our utmost
satisfaction while ensuring full data consistency.”
Executive overview Company
Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
Creating dedicated test cases to help
ensure legal compliance
The new VBL-specific data model was created in only two test cycles. Selecting 701 SAP standard and custom-developed tables out of the 2.2-terabyte production system and integrating them into the defined data model proved to be a challenging task. To meet all compliance standards, VBL’s sensitive data had to be altered using pseudonymization techniques to ensure data protection within the test environment. During the pseudonymization process, the most obvious identifying fields within VBL’s data record such as address, tax identification number, and so on were randomly replaced by artificial identifiers. Pseudonymization is a first step to prepare for complete data anonymization, which ensures that the original data set – for example the personal data of a retiree – can no longer be identified.
In order to facilitate a smooth handover, the team worked via on-site meetings and remote sessions and provided user training to VBL users and developers. “There was great communication and extremely high satisfaction among the team,” says Müller.
701
VBL-specific tables integrated into the data
Company Vision Why SAP Solution
Benefits
Future plans
Maintaining consistency across all
processes and applications
By using SAP TDMS, VBL is now able to provide high-quality test data, decrease storage space requirements on all nonproductive systems, comply with data protection regulations, and reduce efforts for administration and data provisioning.
“We chose SAP TDMS to become VBL’s strategic platform. This solution grants us the freedom to implement all legal requirements. Our envisioned goal is to use SAP TDMS for building test scenarios that cover almost 100% of all our test cases,” says Thomas Bönig, IT director at VBL. “This is extremely
important and beneficial for us, because what cannot be tackled via SAP TDMS has to be done manually and that is very cost intensive. Our IT department can now create test systems with less effort and on a selective basis. The creation of new test systems now takes less than a week. And a major advantage is the selective migration of small amounts of data – for example, specific defects – within less than one day, increasing efficiency and speeding up our testing sequence.”
“SAP TDMS was integral in helping us establish highly automated test data
provisioning, and we have the opportunity to build regulatory requirements
into the tool. SAP TDMS guarantees data quality in our test landscape in
the long run.”
Executive overview Company
Vision Why SAP Solution Benefits Future plans
Future milestones for
thorough testing
“Complete data anonymization is our defined goal, and upgrading all systems to the latest SAP release is one of our major prerequisites for supporting our company’s strategic goals,” explains Bönig. “Offering stable test data for most of our business processes and enabling a fully automated test environment will help reduce costs and reassign resources to more important tasks. Furthermore, we are focusing on the manual setup of special test scenarios when implementing a new release or new legal requirements.” Bönig adds: “VBL considers SAP the perfect partner to specialize in and cover more functionality for individual insurance solutions.” According to Bönig, VBL as a public enterprise, counts on SAP to extend its solution expertise.
edit |
Ver
sor
gung
sans
talt de
s Bunde
s und der L
änder (VBL
), K
arlsruhe
, German
y.
U
sed with permis
sion.
“One of the future challenges is ensuring
sustainability and compliance for the test
data management environment.”
Christoph Rieder, Project Manager for Test Data Management Systems, Versorgungsanstalt des Bundes und der Länder
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