CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Santander
Banking on business rules
Growing into one of Europe’s largest banks has created a highly complex IT infrastructure for Santander (www.santander.com). With more than 10,000 offices in 40 countries and an extensive product portfolio governed by ever-changing policies and regulations, the bank must streamline its IT operations to cut costs and improve customer service.

To accomplish this, Santander has chosen ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), as a key part of a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. In Banksphere, Santander’s multichannel banking middleware platform, ILOG JRules will automate decision making and policy management across the organization, enhancing business agility and shortening response times.

The bank decided to go with SOA to have a single platform for standardizing processes and creating “product factories,” back-office systems able to process the products of various distribution channels. ILOG JRules will enable Santander to maximize the reusability and adaptability of its platform across branch offices, and respond quickly to changes in regulations and market conditions. “Santander considers IT a key component of its business strategy,” says Maite Agujetas, chief architecture officer at Santander. “We are confident that the implementation of ILOG JRules in Banksphere will help us enhance our competitiveness by making a significant contribution toward harmonizing our IT infrastructure and ensuring we can react quickly to changing business conditions.”

Santander is already considering ways to deploy ILOG JRules in other projects, including applications for managing subscriptions and determining buying propensity, risk qualification and credit ratings, as well as a system for selecting and listing documents for bank transactions.

Bearing Point, one of the world’s largest business consulting and system integration companies (www.bearingpoint.com), and ILOG recently worked in partnership on an automated loan and credit decisioning platform for China Everbright Bank (www.ebchina.com).

The new system enables the bank to process a loan application in just one day, instead of several weeks, greatly improving customer service and cutting costs substantially.

Everbright Bank has more than 350 offices in 36 cities throughout China, and assets of $41 billion. It provides commercial loans for a wide range of industries, and has outstanding loans totaling $24 billion. As the local economy grows, the Chinese government creates new regulations that make the bank’s process for clearing loans increasingly complex. To provide competitive service, the bank must use a solution that automates the process and can be readily updated with new policies and products.

Built with ILOG JRules, the leading business rule management system, the bank’s new application handles the prequalification and underwriting work, freeing employees from a cumbersome manual system and providing better risk management. ILOG JRules is also used in tracking loans to reduce losses from delinquent or delayed payments.

BASF
Plastic on demand
Few things are more modern and omnipresent than plastic. Manufacturers are constantly finding new uses for this highly versatile, manmade material: car parts, furniture, food containers, IT equipment – the list seems endless.

Meeting demand for plastic requires its makers to schedule production quickly and accurately to fill orders on time. World-leading chemical company BASF (www.basf.com) contends with this challenge daily at its styrene polymer plants in Belgium, Germany and Spain.

BASF keeps these factories running smoothly with a production planning system that combines ILOG optimization software with SAP’s Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO). The solution makes BASF’s production planners two to three times faster, and better aligns output with demand. The new planning system also lowers stock levels, cutting inventory costs while maintaining BASF’s ability to deliver products to its customers with the shortest turnaround time possible.

“The combination of the ILOG optimization software and SAP APO enables us to plan the production continuously for any given production volume,” explains Stephen Franke, business expert at BASF and manager of the new planning system. “The ILOG engine returns planning solutions quickly to the planner, accelerating the entire planning process. As a result, we can now communicate and discuss plans between production planners and on-site staff more efficiently.”

Education is a growth industry in South Africa, where North-West University (NWU: www.uniwest.ac.za) has experienced a dramatic increase in enrollment. NWU currently has more than 30,000 students taking hundreds of classes through three campuses and 80 centers spread across the country. Meeting demand through scheduling operations is challenging for the school -- but with ILOG technology, it is far from insurmountable.

The university relies on two applications from ITS Abacus (www.its.co.za) to optimally organize activities: o!Timetable for class and venue scheduling, and o!Exam for exam scheduling. They create more course options for students and prevent clashes in schedules. Essential to these applications is ILOG optimization software for constraint and mathematical programming. ILOG CPLEX and ILOG Constraint Programming provide the power and speed needed to handle extremely large timetabling problems. The solutions they produce are displayed with a graphical user interface (GUI) based on ILOG Views. The GUI enables course planners to easily refine schedules on screen, and format them to meet specific end-user requirements. NWU has not been alone in its success using ITS Abacus. The o! applications are used by other schools in the region, including Tshwane Institute of Technology, University of the Western Cape, Durban Institute of Technology, and University of Venda.

“o! has enabled us to produce both class and examination timetables of the highest quality and flexibility in record-breaking time,” says Ivan Meyer, o!Timetable product manager and former timetabler at North-West University. “ILOG optimization components ensure that all resources are used optimally, while clash-free examination timetables with good paper spread have greatly increased student and staff satisfaction across our campuses.”

Airline seats, hotel rooms and rental cars worth millions of dollars go unsold every day. Travel Web service Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) helps travel companies recoup profits by selling their unsold inventory at reduced prices while maintaining margins.

The volume and variety of Hotwire’s offerings have resulted in a huge set of business rules. To gain greater scalability and flexibility for managing these rules, Hotwire has adopted ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS).

ILOG JRules has freed the rules from a database, where they could only be updated by IT personnel. Now, the rules are kept in a central repository directly accessible to Hotwire’s business analysts.

ILOG JRules enables Hotwire to expand revenue opportunities and improve business response times. When a new offer is added, the rules for making it available can be put into service almost immediately. The BRMS also enables Hotwire to stay compliant with industry regulations and the policies of the travel companies it represents.

“Hotwire has seen significant improvements in hardware scalability with ILOG JRules,” says Vikas Sabnani, senior manager of revenue management at Hotwire, “enabling us to deploy increasingly complex pricing rules to support new products without much incremental investment. We’ve reduced time to market for new features, helping drive higher profitability and enhancing the consumer experience.”

Built with ILOG Gantt for .NET, the Adrega PPM graphical interface gives users a clear view of project tasks and goals. Click to enlarge (opens a new window)

If every company is a ship in the sea of business, project portfolio management (PPM) solutions are the map, compass and logbook of upper management.

Adrega AS (www.adrega.com) develops PPM solutions for companies in different industries throughout Scandinavia. Its flagship product, Adrega PPM, places vital project information at the fingertips of management teams and individual project managers through powerful functionality and a cutting-edge graphical user interface (GUI). The objective of every Adrega solution is to provide a highly graphical environment that enables project leaders to make the best decisions for directing tasks to ensure on-time results. For this, Adrega uses ILOG Gantt for .NET in the GUI to accurately show project data in readily understood Gantt charts. Essential project information such as deadlines, goals and assigned tasks and resources are displayed to track the progress of activities. Risk factors can be clearly shown, and the end user can see the interdependencies of activities to assess the impact of delays on a project. Adrega also uses ILOG Gantt for .NET to natively support components from other suppliers in the Adrega PPM GUI.

“Adrega PPM enables companies across Scandinavia to make important, profitable decisions daily,” says Omar Thune, managing director of Adrega. “It’s become a crucial tool for managing their operations effectively. We rely on ILOG Gantt for .NET to exactly meet each customer’s needs for precision graphics and accurate forecasting.”