Providing Business Agility Through BPM Solutions
We have the ability to leverage our experience in PRPC from installation and infrastructure to testing and deployment. Our consultants are certified in PRPC V5.x with many having worked with the tool since version 2.0. We are active participants in Pegasystems’ internal design clinic and are contributors to the Pega Developer’s Network.
Pegasystems’ Professional Services has partnered with Rulesware on many of their client engagements as well as requesting our services for design review. Rulesware has also collaborated with IBM, Accenture, Satyam and Wipro on PRPC based projects.
What follows are a few examples of our work.
Client: A top 5 US Insurance Company
Engagement Description: The development of an advanced lead management solution capable of the creation of leads; the viewing, updating, and resolution of leads; and the monitoring of agency and sales activity. The organization involved in utilizing this capability primarily consists of agents and agency support staff, though additional field and home office users will also utilize this system.
The development of the solution had the additional requirements of:
• An extremely aggressive delivery schedule
• Integration with a single complex system of record
• Include the business users’ ability to change business process and rules
• Multiple Insurance products across various lines of business with state regulated variations
• Deployment of the solution to multiple support organization with very little experience in BPM
based technologies
• Utilize the Insurance Framework
Rulesware’s Contributions: Using an iterative based methodology with heavy reliance on Use Case development, the implementation team was divided into sub teams that were assigned specific Use Cases. The overall design and requirements validation was managed by a governance team that coordinated all efforts including the training of end users and infrastructure build.
Rulesware was able to deliver the solutions within the restraints of the aggressive schedule, including the integration with the customer’s authentication system, legacy customer data sources and quote and bind application. The solution included implementing internal processes to manage the changing and maintenance of business rules, and distributing these roles to the customer’s internal staff.
This solution was successfully deployed in three phases, one phase rolled out in each of the last three quarters of 2007.
Back Office Automation
Client: A leading diversified financial services company operating in approximately 40 countries around the world.
Engagement Description: The purpose of this engagement is to develop a solution platform to automate various back office business processes for US and Canadian servicing organizations. Expected benefits from the solution include improved customer service, improved process efficiency, enhanced management and control of back office operations, and flexible allocation of work to different onshore/offshore vendors.
The solution had to meet the following challenges:
• Multiple business processes with a high level of complexity
• Distributed to different servicing departments in several countries
• Replacement of many disparate antiquated applications
• Working with Pega’s sophisticated Customer Process Management framework
• Architectural strategies involving encryption and secure data transfer due to the sensitive nature
of financial and personal data
Rulesware’s Contributions: The 2+ year project was divided into multiple phases based on business process. Each phase involved a plan and define component with a milestone check and review before proceeding with Design/Construction/Test/Deployment. Plan and define for Phase 1 has been completed and is underway for Phase 2.
The data, conceptual and process architecture identified many gaps in the current system and provided a road map to a robust solution that meets the business and technical requirements of the customer. Messaging and legacy system integration were tested and proven, and architecture for the authentication and security mechanisms was created.
Client: A Fortune 500 company recognized for exceptional financial strength and stability among the nation's largest insurers.
Engagement Description: This engagement focused on building an insurance application that provides quotes for commercial policies. The customer’s network of independent brokers required a system that would be easy to use yet provide the functionality to incorporate large sets of data needed to produce accurate quotes for business policies. Through PRPC the project team was able to create a sophisticated user interface that provided a comprehensive navigation system, while utilizing integration rules to extract data from systems of record.
Rulesware’s Contributions: Rulesware thought leadership enabled the design and construction of the end to end solution. Rulesware was a key contributor in designing and enhancing the Tree Navigation structure that is the core of the sophisticated user interface of the application. This navigation system is able to dynamically add, create and modify nodes based on complex business rules—an important feature of the system due to the lengthy and data rich nature of quoting commercial line policies. This was one of the first implementations of Tree Structure Navigation in a PRPC project. In addition, Rulesware also provided performance and infrastructure best practice guidelines to ensure a smooth transition to deployment.
Client: One of the nation's largest commercial banking organizations in the southeastern U.S.
Engagement Description: Implementation of a sophisticated check imaging solution for the detection of fraudulent checks. By utilizing Optical Character Recognition together with a Business Rules Engine built with PRPC, potential fraud items are now identified and delivered to investigators for follow up.
Rulesware’s Contributions: Rulesware resources were responsible for the analysis, design, and construction of the complete PRPC solution. Additionally, the Rulesware staff trained and managed the IBM offshore team which would eventually be utilized for ongoing operational support. The primary challenge to this project was delivering sophisticated business rules which are maintainable by the business users, while meeting high speed processing requirements. Through the development of an easy to navigate administrative portal, the business users have been enabled to continually tune the 200+ business rules and react in real time to the analysis that is enabled through the closed-loop processing of this document image analysis solution.
Marketing and Media Campaign Management
Client: The nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurance company.
Engagement Description: Create a simplified, streamlined process for implementing and documenting an insurance company’s new marketing and media campaigns that leverage their agency, customer service, and measurement systems. The company recognized the need to provide a centralized access point for campaign initiation, management, and measurement as the existing process involved several different groups each employing unique technologies and processes.
The client needed a solution that addressed the following:
• Customer data resided in multiple systems of record: mainframe legacy, large data warehouses
and modern SOA based systems.
• Sensitive customer data had to be secure.
• Rules governing the management of campaigns were constantly changing and had to be
managed by business users.
• Business processes spanned multiple departments and included many different roles and
functions.
Rulesware’s Contributions: A four phased approach was designed to meet the client’s needs.
First, a Campaign Management tool on the PRPC platform was created that has a standard set of user interfaces and processes to replace the manual exchange of data with an automated system. This reduced manual errors, standardized the campaign management process, and defined knowledge and expertise that previously only resided in the minds of individuals. Rulesware made the user interfaces customizable based upon user groups and compatible with future upgrades.
Secondly, roles were defined and instituted to manage parts of the campaign management process. This eliminated redundant tasks and enabled role based process participation.
Next, the team enabled the business activity monitoring tools within PRPC to monitor process activity and assist in the identification of possible process improvements. Such an implementation is aligned with the standard BPM best practices of constant process improvement and monitoring.
Finally, to allow for intelligent assessments of campaign success and the re-use of historic campaigns, a process was created to address the archiving of previous campaigns for metrics, reporting, and re-use. Specialized document generation features to enhance PRPC’s standard correspondence functions were designed and built as well.
This solution was deployed successfully in Q3 of 2007 with no known issues or problems to date.
Guided Process Policy Administration
Client: A Fortune 50 corporation and the nation’s leading insurer of cars, homes and watercrafts.
Engagement Description: This initiative focused on the optimization of policy administration functions through the implementation of a guided system to automate end-to-end service processes. This included the elimination of decision points and manual effort which were present in the previous system. The solution functioned as a rules engine with a presentation layer, guiding the user through specific activities involved in policy services via the use of reflexive questioning. The design and implementation strategy focused on delivering highly complex rules to be built up front, and thus be leverageable by future phases, included several design patterns and best practices recommended by the Rulesware team. This strategy considerably accelerated subsequent phases of this initiative. The solution went into production in June of 2007.
Rulesware’s Contributions: Rulesware resources were responsible for providing technical thought leadership during construction and subsequent phases of the project, aiding in design strategies and building PRPC knowledge within the client team. The primary challenge to this project was delivering breadcrumb functionality (now an out-of-the-box feature of PRPC), and having the ability to retain user data throughout unlimited flow permutations chosen by the end users prior to the selection of a final path. Additional challenges to this project included delivering creative solutions for the display of information via the user interface to increase end-user acceptance, and delivering sophisticate integration processing while maintaining guardrail compliance for ease of maintenance.
Proposal and Policy Management
Client: The third-largest Personal Lines property and casualty insurer in the United States.
Engagement Description: A web based, PRPC application was built to manage proposals and policies for multiple lines of business. This application replaced the functionality of multiple Legacy systems (both mainframe and J2EE) and manual processes used for Quoting, Underwriting, Workflow, Issuing and Binding of Insurance Policies with a single comprehensive solution. The Application fully integrated with multiple Service Bureaus and Legacy mainframe system using industry standard technologies such as SOA and Web services.
What used to take days to accomplish with the manually intensive Legacy systems and processes, can now be accomplished in minutes. Initially released in the spring of 2007 to limited lines of business with limited scope, subsequent releases have included additional lines of business and expanded scope. Each new release extends the functionality of prior releases through code re-use for common functionality, rather than custom coding for each new product supported.
Rulesware’s Contributions: Rulesware resources played key roles in all areas of development from the initial analysis and design, through construction, implementation, and on-going maintenance and enhancement phases of the product.
In addition to direct application development roles, Rulesware provided consultation to the client in the areas of PRPC best practices for internal staff development, operational support, and staff augmentation. This enables the client to continue with development and operational excellence long after Rulesware has left the engagement.
Rulesware also played a role in the client assuming its parent company’s Commercial Book of Business. Prior to the successful roll-out of the PRPC based application, this option was not considered to be possible. The success of the project has broadened the consideration of PRPC solutions for other areas of the organization.
Suspicious Activity Investigation Management
Client: A major financial holding company with 1,600 branch locations and 2,700 ATMs in the U.S.
Engagement Description: Consolidation of various disparate systems that gather, manage and report on information specific to the investigation of suspicious activity. The new system will allow for sharing, reporting and standardizing information at an enterprise level that ultimately provides knowledge and visibility across all suspicious activities.
Rulesware’s Contributions: Rulesware resources were key members of the team responsible for the analysis, design, and construction of the complete PRPC solution. Design challenges included complex work object and cover management, multiple work object creation methods, and keeping a parallel system of record up to date with key information. The solution had to not only use Word and PDF form templates accessible from a flow action, but also utilized for a key report. Additionally, a custom authentication process was designed and put into place to authenticate and create operator records based upon employee's membership in one or more active directory groups.
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