CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Travelocity
Greater business agility
Business agility – the ability to respond quickly to meet market demand or other changes in the business environment – is essential in the travel industry, where new offerings, policies and regulations go into effect around the clock.

Already the fifth largest travel agency in the United States, Web-based Travelocity (www.travelocity.com) sees agility as an important strategic advantage. Through an enterprisewide license agreement with Sabre Holding, Travelocity’s parent company, ILOG JRules will be used to improve the agency’s response time, customer experience and time to market for products and services.

Travelocity will deploy the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS) across its travel planning products and applications, capturing and implementing business policies in business rules kept in a central repository. Developers, business analysts and other authorized personnel will be able to access the rules and modify them quickly. Once deployed, the ILOG-based BRMS will enable the agency to roll out new products and services faster, and provide usability enhancements such as the ability to exactly match special offers to customer preferences.

"Travelocity plays in a white-hot competitive environment,” says Barry Vandevier, Travelocity CTO. “We selected ILOG JRules as part of an ongoing effort to be more agile to changing market conditions and to improve the usability of the Travelocity site.”

An ILOG customer since 1998, Sabre Holding uses ILOG’s full line of technologies – business rule, optimization and visualization – in a variety of products for the travel industry.

China’s sixth largest insurance company, Taiping Life (www.tplife.com) recently launched an application capable of handling the daily workload of 2,000 underwriters. Seems like a lot, but now that China’s insurance market has been deregulated, it’s growing at an annual rate of 25 percent.

With new orders pouring in, Taiping Life’s underwriters are breathing a collective sigh of relief because the new Underwriting Rule System enables them to get more done and still give special attention to unique cases.

ILOG JRules enables the new system to excel, as its rule engine can fire thousands of rules per second. Add to this rule authoring and maintenance in Chinese for unequaled flexibility and accuracy, and you have a highly competitive solution. Policy managers can directly make, test and deploy business rules for the system. New products and services can be introduced immediately, giving customers the latest offerings quickly, at the best possible rates for the greatest satisfaction.

“Joining other leading insurers throughout the world that have embraced a BRMS to streamline everything from claims to underwriting,” says Mr. Wang Xin, deputy general manager, Taiping Life, “Taiping Life is the first company in China to utilize this powerful technology to boost productivity and provide our clients with faster, more convenient and more personalized service.”

The Underwriting Rule System was built by FirstTech, a Shanghai-based ILOG partner that specializes in insurance and manufacturing solutions.