CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Policy Studies Inc.
Improving government healthcare service
Policy Studies Inc. (PSI) administers children's health insurance and Medicaid programs for U.S. states. The organization provides assistance ranging from consulting and system building to service provisioning for public healthcare programs.

To enable the state of Virginia to more quickly and accurately qualify applicants for the its health insurance program, PSI has developed the Child Health Administration Management Program System (CHAMPS). Web-based, CHAMPS can be accessed from offices throughout the state, and has halved the time needed to process an application. ILOG JRules ensures the speed and accuracy of the solution. IT staff can capture and update regulatory constraints quickly, and apply them in real time, and complex rules, including those for Medicaid assistance, are fully taken into account in qualifying applicants. This helps the state provide all the benefits adopted by its legislators.

With ILOG JRules, new regulations are quickly converted into business rules that can be immediately applied with CHAMPS. Virginia saves on training and provides more agile, reliable service, processing on average four to five applications an hour, twice as many as before.

"It is nearly impossible to expect a person to learn, recall and adapt to the ever-changing federal and state regulations for child healthcare programs. Implementation of ILOG JRules can remove this knowledge barrier, ease the screening process, and streamline application procedures." Al Hawker Director Health Technologies PSI

AT Consulting
Shipping scheduler grows with maker
Capital Group FORTE has been a top Polish furniture maker for over a decade, building much of its success on innovative IT for manufacturing and distributing products. For its critical logistics operations, FORTE relies on AT Consulting's OptiTrans System in loading and routing trucks for both domestic and international deliveries.

To maintain FORTE's lead in the industry and support a business plan that depends heavily on expansion into new markets, AT Consulting recently upgraded OptiTrans with ILOG Dispatcher and ILOG Solver. The result is a faster application with significantly greater geographical coverage. ILOG optimization enables OptiTrans to plan shipments to 350 FORTE customers in different countries throughout Europe in just five minutes, an impossible achievement for the last version of the logistics system.

"We have redesigned our old OptiTrans product," says Olgierd Dziamski, project manager at AT Consulting. "Using ILOG Dispatcher and ILOG Solver, the new product is much more functional and provides a completely new quality."

OptiTrans is a comprehensive logistics system. Using ILOG Dispatcher and ILOG Solver, it fully meets the unique requirements of different markets, customers, transportation regulations, route and load planning, merchandise packaging and warehouse storage. ILOG optimization provides the scalability and speed OptiTrans needs to ensure FORTE's on-time delivery service. ILOG has also made OptiTrans fully customizable, enabling AT Consulting to tailor the system to the specific needs of other manufacturers and retailers.

Swisscom Fixnet AG
No-hands order processing
One of Europe's top telecommunications companies, Swisscom Fixnet AG has reached its goals for order processing, by using an ILOG JRules-based order management system (OMS) that both validates orders and expedites service fulfillment.

Swisscom Fixnet receives thousands of orders from customers each week. Checking them the old way - manually - was inefficient, given the number of operations and unavoidable natural human error.

By automating the process for validating orders and then running them through a "virtual operator" for planning and scheduling activities and informing partner systems, Swisscom Fixnet has achieved huge cost savings and dramatically improved quality of service. Today, at least 90 percent of the company's orders are processed without being touched by a single person.

"Thanks to the use of ILOG JRules, we are able to adapt our order management system in a very short time," says Dominique Gueniat, software engineer at Swisscom IT Services AG. "ILOG JRules enables us to respond more quickly to our customers' needs, resulting in shorter time to market and cost savings."

The tremendous competition in telecommunications has made customer satisfaction and retention an almost singular pursuit. Through systems like Swisscom Fixnet's OMS, ILOG JRules is contributing to the continued growth of leading companies in the industry.

National Football League
Optimizing the season
Scheduling over 256 games in a regular football season is hard enough, but doing so profitably while making team owners, fans, and television and radio networks happy can seem virtually impossible. For the National Football League, scheduling a regular season involves an enormous number of constraints, and the outcome of any game can impact the rest of the season.

"Sengen understands our unique requirements and, using ILOG technology, has automated much of the process while factoring in specific guidelines, which we were able to test, continuously modify and refine during the process of creating the 2003 playing schedule." Dennis Lewin Senior Vice President NFL

Radian Group
Applications to share rules
Radian Group Inc.'s new transaction processing platform is considered a key technology in the company's strategy to build its presence as a diversified global provider of financial and mortgage services.

Global expansion takes tremendous agility, and Radian is achieving it with a new transaction processing platform that uses ILOG JRules and its business rule management features. The business rules embedded in Radian's various standalone systems are being replaced with rules created and centrally stored with ILOG JRules. This will enable the company to share business rules across its applications.

"The improved flexibility enabled by [ILOG] JRules means that we can respond faster and more cost-effectively to changes in our business strategy," says Liz Shuttleworth, senior vice president and CIO of Radian. "It will also help give us the flexibility to be more responsive to our customers by ensuring the consistency of customer information across all our systems."

Radian's first deployment with ILOG JRules will be a pricing application that will use ILOG business rules to dynamically manage mortgage interest rate changes. Radian currently handles as many as 1 million mortgage pricing requests a month.