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Customer Case Study

KKH Statutory Health Insurance Fund

Enhances Staff Productivity & Minimizes Risks with Fast, Simple Db2 Cloning
Industry
Insurance
Company
With annual revenues of 5.5 billion euros, KKH Statutory Health Insurance Fund is one of the largest health insurance funds in Germany, providing insurance to 1.8 million people. Based in Hanover, the fund employs approximately 4,000 people who provide health advice to customers from 110 service centers across the country. The data stored by KKH is highly sensitive, containing detailed patient information that includes diagnoses, treatment plans, and financial details. In addition, KKH performs reconciliations with data from other statutory insurance providers as well as financial institutions on a regular basis.
Challenge
An IBM® z13s™ system is at the core of all activity in the fund's data center. The mainframe runs key applications, using IBM Db2® for z/OS® to manage operational data. KKH runs load and volume tests on a regular basis, using a pre-production system. Each quarter, the administrators copy a large volume of the data from the production Db2 subsystem to this target system.

Until recently, the copy process was conducted leveraging snapshots and solutions that had been developed in-house. However, this task increasingly required the team to drill more deeply into the Db2 system’s structures, especially after each Db2 version change. Successfully cloning Db2 objects required a two-step process: first, the team copied the data in “snapshots,” then made the data available again in the Db2 target system.

Results
  • Eliminated 40 man-hours of manual cloning per quarter
  • Extended availability of consolidation system for test purposes by three days, minimizing the risk of failure
  • Enhanced staff productivity resulted in better customer response times and a more competitive set of applications
Products
Applications
  • IBM Db2® for z/OS®
Our work involved in cloning the Db2 database has been reduced by more than half...The quicker we are in delivering better and faster applications, the more productive and competitive the whole of KKH is as a result.
Petra Dießel
Database Organizer
KKH Hanover