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CUSTOMERS
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Greater customer satisfaction |
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Bank of the West
Loans in just one day with BRMS
Offering better service faster is the driving force behind Bank of the West’s decision to use ILOG JRules, ILOG’s top business rule management system (BRMS), in automating the bank’s entire loan review and approval process.
Bank of the West (www.bankofthewest.com) is among the largest banks in the United States. It has over 10,000 employees at more than 700 retail and commercial banking locations in 19 Western and Midwestern states, and serves more than 3 million households and businesses.
Currently, the bank relies on a paper-based loan review process that can take days to complete and involve several different departments. Both federal and state regulations, as well as in-house policies, must be met, and costly errors have the potential of occurring anywhere in the process.
Automation with ILOG JRules
To deliver loans faster, Bank of the West decided to create a new loan origination system based on FileNet business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, and use ILOG JRules to implement policies in the new system. The system will fully automate all the tasks in the review and approval process, including data capture, management of approval queue and credential assessment.
The system is expected to ease the workload of the bank’s credit administrators and reduce operational costs while shortening the time for processing loans to as little as one day. It will even help with the paperwork by automatically prefilling credit application forms.
“In addition to slashing the time required for a credit review cycle, ILOG JRules will enable us to create a standard, streamlined credit review process that the entire bank will follow,” says Lenard East, vice president for Strategic Planning and Administration in Commercial Banking at Bank of the West.
“Behind the scenes, ILOG technology, which is proving to be very intuitive, allows us to
create scenarios and evaluate results before putting them into production,” Mr. East explains. “This will give us a greater level of control and a higher degree of confidence in the business rules we put in place. Most importantly, ILOG JRules will help provide our credit administrators with timely access to better quality information to ensure an optimal credit review process.”
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Keeping Singapore’s lights on
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Energy Market Company
Electricity at the lowest cost
Ensuring a secure, reliable flow of electricity at the lowest cost is a shared objective of central power authorities, especially in areas with several electricity suppliers.
Energy Market Company (EMC: www.emcsg.com) oversees the National Electricity Market of Singapore (NEMS), the first wholesale electricity market liberalized in Asia. Serving as Singapore’s “stock exchange” for electricity, EMC completes the circuit between electricity retailers and local power companies by providing market governance and a central trading environment.
EMC relies on the Market Clearing Engine (MCE) application to match supply to demand. Every half-hour, the power companies offer to generate quantities of electricity at their selling prices. These “bids” are pooled in the wholesale market, where the MCE determines the best combination of electricity generation schedules for meeting demand at the lowest cost.
Optimal mix
ILOG CPLEX, the market-leading mathematical optimizer, plays an important role in the MCE by calculating the optimal mix of energy sources for keeping costs down. More than 15,000 constraints and bounds must be addressed with each trade, and ILOG CPLEX runs through them in less than 30 seconds.
“We implemented ILOG CPLEX in the Market Clearing Engine of the National Electricity Market of Singapore in 2003,” says Henry Gan, vice president of Pricing and Information, EMC. “The results we have achieved with ILOG CPLEX have met our expectations and goals. We have also received good local support from ILOG Singapore throughout the years when it was required.”
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Adding the personal touch |
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PSA Peugeot Citroën
Cars made to order with ILOG JRules
Car buyers seem to vary in taste almost as greatly as they do in DNA. Modern production methods can accommodate vastly different preferences, but when orders are in the magnitude of hundreds of thousands, only a highly sophisticated order management system can handle the complexity.
For the PSA Peugeot Citroën Group (www.psa-peugeot-citroen.com), Europe’s second largest automaker, orders pour in at a rate of more than 300,000 per month, requiring production lead time to be calculated in real time. Determining the processing time for an order means addressing about 500 manufacturing constraints covering everything from engine type and transmission to wheel rims and upholstery fabric.
These factors led PSA to adopt a flexible order management system based on ILOG JRules, ILOG’s top business rule management system (BRMS). With a reliability rate of 90 percent, the new system lets PSA accurately calculate lead times to further improve responsiveness and customer service.
Supporting two car brands
The system serves both PSA brands: Peugeot and Citroën. PSA’s business users can directly define and update business rules for the system, which runs about 18,000 rules for each brand in calculating lead times for assembling vehicles.
Users run five simulations a day, each lasting no longer than 45 minutes, to account for real-time resource changes that can include delivery times, model changes and equipment maintenance. The results are used to set new priorities and keep sales and manufacturing personnel informed of current production operations.
ILOG has been working with the PSA Group for several years. The carmaker has successfully deployed ILOG optimization-based solutions for an online sales configurator, and is expected to use ILOG JRules in future applications such as contract management and commissioning systems.
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Bringing the Internet home |
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@NetHome
Faster delivery of Internet services
Through cable-company partners throughout Japan, @NetHome provides high-speed Internet, media and IP telephone services to more than 850,000 households. Posing a challenge to the company’s delivery of both new and existing services are thousands of partner policies, technical constraints and customer preferences.
To overcome this challenge, @NetHome (www.nethome.jp
) has adopted a business support system (BSS) solution based on ILOG JRules, ILOG’s top business rule management system (BRMS). It uses business rules to capture and consolidate policies residing with different applications into a single platform, reducing IT maintenance costs and shortening time to deployment for new policies.
Flexible system to cope with changes
@NetHome chose ILOG JRules because the company needed a more flexible system to cope with frequent changes to service policies and agreements, and to accelerate the introduction of new offers and customer-tailored service plans. @NetHome’s last BSS was hard-coded, so whenever business information changed, part of the system had to be rewritten. This made it very difficult to implement changes quickly.
The new system, which complements a business process management (BPM) system and supports a larger service-oriented architecture (SOA) project, uses ILOG JRules to centrally store the business logic linked to various policies on several siloed systems. When a product offer, customer information or a contract is changed, only its rules in the repository have to be updated.
The new system makes it much easier to handle customer subscriptions and cancellations, and @NetHome needs less time to set up new services. Another plus to the system is that rules are written in Japanese, making it easy for @NetHome business users to edit and deploy rules.
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