Customers
Insurer overhauls with JRules
Overhauling an insurance underwriting system that supports more than 860,000 customers and 10,500 businesses could be a risky undertaking without the right software.
This was the position Groupe Mutuel (www.groupemutuel.ch) found itself in. Comprising 14 insurance companies that provide a full range of insurance products – health, accident, life, death and disability – Groupe Mutuel decided to overhaul and unify its IT systems to offer better, more competitive service.
The insurance group opted to create a service-oriented architecture (SOA) using ILOG JRules, the market-leading ILOG business rule management system (BRMS), as a core component to automate claims management processes by checking healthcare invoices to determine eligibility for reimbursement.
The group processes about 6 million healthcare invoices annually, checking them against contracts, regulations, internal policies, special agreements and numerous other constraints that need constant updating. ILOG JRules automates most of the processing, minimizing errors and shortening delivery time. ILOG JRules’ rule management features also let Groupe Mutuel’s business specialists define, deploy and disable rules directly.
“Within the context of overhauling our IT system,” explains Pierre-Marcel Revaz, CEO and founder of Groupe Mutuel, “we were looking for a flexible and efficient tool to improve our healthcare invoice verification process and be more reactive to business change requests.”
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Goals for insurance success
A leading global insurer, Hiscox (www.hiscox.co.uk) had three main objectives for its IT initiative:
- Have the ability to add new distribution channels quickly
- Reduce the time and cost of maintaining products and introducing new ones
- Give underwriters and business analysts direct access to system logic to improve business response time
It achieved these goals with ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS). Part of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), ILOG JRules supports a wide range of insurance processes with decision services and business rules that can be reused across different distribution channels.
To market – pronto!
Hiscox’s success is based largely on providing individual and commercial customers with specialist insurance considered too complex or risky for more general insurers. An FTSE 250 company, Hiscox is Europe’s foremost insurer of fine art and the world’s largest provider of kidnap and ransom insurance by premium income.
Hiscox has to release new products fast to stay competitive. It used to take the company six months to do this on average. With ILOG JRules, the insurance company can easily create and test new insurance products, rates and risk classification tiers, and time to market is expected to improve by more than 50 percent.
ILOG JRules lets Hiscox’s underwriters and analysts directly manage rules and rates implemented for each scheme, and perform what-if scenarios to test new products and rates. The BRMS also enabled the introduction of a Web-based service for selling insurance and providing related support.
“Our aim is to provide a personal service to our customers while also making the most of technology in order to keep costs down,” says Alan Millard, chief operating officer at Hiscox. “For us, managing costs is as important as managing risk if we are to remain competitive on premiums. ILOG allows us to introduce efficiencies into our operations, and the rule system provides the necessary flexibility to maintain our unique position.”
ILOG in insurance
ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make it one of the insurance industry’s leading providers of BRMS solutions. Analysts have consistently rated ILOG among the leaders in the BRMS market, and insurance companies recently reported in this newsletter include Anbang Insurance, Hospitals Contribution Fund and Samsung Life. You can learn more about ILOG in insurance at www.ilog.com/industries/insurance.
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Diagram shows yarn routing through BIG production facility
Optimal yarn production
Beaulieu International Group (BIG: www.bintg.com) has grown into a major producer of yarn, making more than 10,000 tons of it each month at six manufacturing sites in Belgium and France. Consumer demand and changing trends have led the company to offer over 300 different product families.
Manually scheduling the production of so many different products in such volume is virtually impossible. Yarn production at BIG involves four main processes – master batch production, yarn extrusion, twist/twine and heat setting – and not all of them are used with every product.
BIG has overcome its challenges with a tool for defining a matrix for optimally assigning production equipment. Built by MÖBIUS (www.mobius.eu), a European consulting firm that helps companies solve complex business process management (BPM) and supply chain management (SCM) problems, the planning tool uses a well-defined mathematical optimization model that includes all of BIG’s constraints and key performance indicators (KPIs) for yarn production.
The model is run with ILOG CPLEX, the leading mathematical programming software, to optimally assign production tasks to improve the performance of the KPIs. The MÖBIUS solution also provides a user-friendly dashboard in Microsoft Access for entering data for the model and analyzing the solutions generated by ILOG CPLEX.
The new system generates planning solutions in minutes, and has helped BIG increase production, fill orders more quickly, and move closer to a competitive strategy of coordinated production across all its plants.
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Schedule kept on J.League website
When matches should be held
Soccer is among the top sports in Japan, and the Japan Professional Football League (J.League: www.j-league.or.jp) now has 33 teams playing 682 matches every season. The complexity involved in scheduling so many games and accommodating the different requirements of teams, fans and supporters led the league to ILOG and its leading product for detailed scheduling: ILOG CP.
J.League needed a system to automate and streamline its match scheduling process. No packaged application was available for the task, so the league opted for a custom approach and had ILOG develop the J.League Match Scheduler system using ILOG CP to optimize the game schedules.
ILOG CP supports time-based constraints that allow organizations to generate optimal schedules with precise activity start and stop times. In J.League Match Scheduler, it allows J.League executives to instantly assess and compare several solutions before deciding on a final schedule.
Optimization improves the speed and efficiency of business decision making by enabling organizations to calculate the best utilization of existing resources – in this case, teams, personnel and stadiums. Before J.League Match Scheduler, the league scheduled seasons manually, and took an average of two to three weeks to complete the process. Now, an entire season can be scheduled in a day, facilitating rescheduling to accommodate unexpected events.
“ILOG CP and ILOG JViews, which were incorporated into J.League Match Scheduler, have provided schedules of the highest quality,” says Atsushi Kawasaki of J.League, “while taking into consideration the basic scheduling rules set by J.League and the numerous individual requests of each team.”
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