Question

Hello Experts :)

Could you please give me some advice on the following use case is in relation to insurance company?

An insurance company has 5 different source systems, for the hub POLICY, overall the policy number is the business key, which is unique across the systems.

So the hub design is:
HUB_POLICY
policy_hk   
policy_number  (numeric)
load_date
record_source


Recently the company acquired a life insurance business, the business key of its policy is policy number+product number+claim number.

The question is if a new Hub should be created like this:
HUB_LIFE_POLICY
life_policy_hk   
life_policy_number  
life_product_number
life_claim_number
load_date
record_source

or try to use the existing HUB_POLICY?

By the way, is it a general practice to use the natural name as business key?
One of my colleagues suggested to use standard name to adapt future changes.
For example, the design of the hub policy becomes:

HUB_POLICY
policy_hk   
policy_bk1 (varchar 50)
policy_bk2 (varchar 50)
policy_bk3 (varchar 50)
policy_bk4 (varchar 50)
load_date
record_source

If the design is this, could/should the life insurance policy data be put into the same hub instead of creating a new one?

Many thanks for your advice!

Toni

Answer 1

Hi Toni,

The business key from the new source looks like it is not alligned with the enterprise business key of the organisation.

However you might want to think about a couple of aspects :

- Is it the primary key of the source table you receive?
- Or is it the real business key by which the business communicates within the acquired company?
- If the business communicates by these 3 columns, do they concatenate them ? How do the refer?
- Is it not only a relation (link) between product, (actual) policy) and a claim ?
- How does your enterprise company refer to policies sold within the newly acquired companies ?
- If a CEO wants to look at all policies for one customer, which has a life policy and a car policy, how (what value as "policy") would he expect it to be listed in a report for both values ?

Technically you could create a rawvault hub with either 1 concatenated key or 3 columns and load the data from the new source system.

Also, the outcome might be that, it is not a real policy business key but a relationship (link product,claim,policy) and link satellite containing the source data.

If your company agrees to use the concatenated business key as unique policy in union with the already existing numbers, then you could concatenate the values and load into the current HUB_Policy table, altering the numeric data type to a varchar(150).

Whatever way you choose, make sure it mirrors the way how the business is operating.

If the new keys do not fit yet into the enterprise wide definition of a policy, the use a separate hub and sat.

If both data sets ever need to be combined, let the business define the rules how they want to combine them.

Hope this helps,

Greets Jacob Siemaszko