Customers

Samsung Life Insurance

Fighting fraud with ILOG JRules
Insurance sales are rising fast across Asia Pacific. But along with this rise has come another increase: insurance fraud. According to the Korean Financial Supervisory Service, the number of detected insurance fraud cases in South Korea alone increased by 46 percent in 2006 over 2005.

Samsung Life Insurance (www.samsunglife.com) is fighting back with a new insurance fraud detection system based on ILOG JRules, the market-leading ILOG business rule management system (BRMS). The Insurance Fraud Detection System (IFDS) spots fraud fast, shortening the inspection time for processing 10,000 claims from two weeks to just one day.

Automated fraud detection
With more than 10 million policyholders, Samsung Life Insurance is one of South Korea’s leading insurers. Its last insurance fraud prevention system was mostly manual. The new system automates insurance fraud detection by using business rules to apply knowledge accumulated from past insurance fraud management. With ILOG JRules, IFDS tests claims using 800 different factors, including history of insurance fraud, number of insurance accident cases and number of insurance agreements.

Suspected fraud cases are separated for further inspection by field workers, and when new conditions for detecting fraud are adopted, they are implemented through business rules. All the rules are kept in a central repository to facilitate their maintenance and accessibility. Business users can directly change or add rules to the new system in a single day, while the old system took more than two weeks for the IT department to hard-code changes.

"Utilizing BRMS, we shortened the inspection process for processing 10,000 claims from two weeks to one day," says Dongchul Park, senior manager of the Claims Inspection Section, Samsung Life Insurance. "The field workers can apply the new rules in real time. The more I get to know about the more advanced functions of ILOG BRMS, the more I am impressed by this incredible technology."

 

 

Touring Assurances

Insurer gains agility with BRMS
Maintaining business rules in different applications spread across numerous locations is a complex proposition at best. To stay agile and apply rules consistently, organizations are increasingly centralizing the storage of their business rules and having applications tap the resulting repositories to apply current policies.

Touring Assurances (www.touring-assurances.be), the second largest direct insurance company in Belgium, has adopted this strategy by automating its underwriting system with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based on ILOG JRules, the market-leading ILOG business rule management system (BRMS).

The insurance carrier offers four types of coverage – automobile, motorcycle, travel and home owner – and has more than 100,000 policyholders. The new system lets the company create flexible eligibility, risk classification and pricing tiers, while streamlining the underwriting process. New offers can be launched within 10 days, instead of a month, and rule changes take about three days, an operation that used to take approximately two weeks.

Straight-through processing
The new automated underwriting system enables Touring Assurances to deliver quotes faster and achieve a pass-through rate whereby 80 percent of the incoming policy requests from the Web go directly through the system without any human intervention. Advanced rule management features in ILOG JRules allow the carrier to better align its IT objectives with business strategies by empowering business users with the ability to create and maintain business rules across multiple product lines and geographies.

"Using ILOG JRules means that rules can be created and modified much more quickly, and our business users can now fully understand the rules," says Nathalie Servranckx, Touring Assurances IT manager. "This allows them to reflect the needs of business faster and more accurately. We have also developed a true partnership with ILOG, and have been impressed by both the speed and quality of the project implementation done by the ILOG Professional Services team, who managed to complete the implementation within the tight three-month timescale."

 

 

Korea Telecom

Faster order fulfillment
With a complex, ever-expanding market, Korea Telecom (KT: www.kt.co.kr) needed a workforce scheduling solution capable of optimally assigning personnel.

The company’s old, mostly manual system had become inadequate, and the time taken to schedule work often exceeded the time spent fulfilling orders, as an entire day could be spent allocating over 250,000 work orders to 2,200 onsite workers.

Automated workforce scheduling
As part of its New Operation Support Systems (NeOSS) initiative to eliminate manual systems and reduce its number of key applications from 62 to 36, KT decided to automate its workforce scheduling system with ILOG Constraint Programming (CP). Developed by KSTEC (www.kstec.co.kr), the exclusive distributor of ILOG software in South Korea, the scheduler uses ILOG CP to deliver near real-time performance that reduces time to service and labor costs, and improves customer and employee satisfaction.

"After introducing a workforce scheduling system based on ILOG Constraint Programming, it is possible to process workforce scheduling in almost real time based on many criteria," says Yoon Dong-sik, general manager, KT. "This automated workforce scheduling system is one of the key backend systems of the KT NeOSS system."

South Korea's telecom market is rapidly advancing, with the introduction of wireless broadband (WiBro), triple play services (TPS) and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), as well as the convergence of cable and wireless communications. KT leads the market, and considers the new workforce scheduling system a critical part of its strategy for meeting demand.

 

 

Wake Forest University

JRules backs medical studies
The health of thousands can depend on the outcome a single clinical trial. The importance of medical research makes it imperative that data be carefully collected and screened. The Internet has become invaluable for gathering and processing data in medical studies. However, supporting a study with a Web-based system can be difficult and time consuming.

The IT personnel at the Division of Public Health Sciences at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine (www.wfubmc.edu) have overcome much of the complexity in building and maintaining online data collection systems by using ILOG JRules, ILOG’s top business rule management system (BRMS). It reduces both time and labor in assembling online forms, and makes it far easier for developers to reuse rules to ensure standardization and compliance across projects.

Typically, a study can require 30 or more Web forms, with an average of 100 rules per form. ILOG JRules’ rule authoring enables several forms to be made in a day, where before it took at least a week to develop one. A central rule repository also aids development by making rules easy to share among forms. An entire Web support system can be built and released in as little as 30 days.

The greatest savings come from change management. A clinical trial can last several years, and require numerous changes to its Web forms. With ILOG JRules, updates can be made directly to the rules in the repository by the study’s staff. The rules can also be used as documentation in explaining the inner workings of the forms, as the rules are written in everyday English.

:Every kind of form has processing that can be captured in rules," says Don Babcock, the division’s lead programmer and architect. "I think anyone who uses forms extensively should externalize their processes in rules, rather than program code. You gain a tremendous maintenance advantage. You can just change the underlying rules to customize the form behavior. ILOG JRules allows us to do this to a degree that has impressed us greatly."