CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

BearingPoint
Turning the tide on regulation
Unemployment insurance programs are governed by laws and policies that change like the tides: constantly and relentlessly.

To keep up with this regulatory ebb and flow, the State of Minnesota has hired BearingPoint (www.bearingpoint.com), one of the world’s largest business consulting and system integration firms, to create a system that adapts readily to new regulations and shortens the turnaround time for paying unemployment insurance benefits.

The new system – Unemployment Framework for Automated Claims and Tax Services (uFACTS) – will be used by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, will initially manage the complex eligibility rules that determine liability for unemployment insurance taxation.

The eligibility rules can change considerably from one year to the next. An advantage to using ILOG JRules is that nontechnical DEED personnel will be able to update the uFACTS business rules quickly and directly in response to changes in requirements, compensation guidelines and new tax regulations. The project is part of a $16 million business process redesign and technology modernization initiative. In future phases, ILOG JRules will also manage the overall rules for processing unemployment insurance claims.

“Our goal is to make the new system more responsive to the many changes in policy and law pertaining to Minnesota’s unemployment insurance program. We believe ILOG JRules will help achieve this objective.” Scott Malm Senior Manager BearingPoint

BT Syntegra
Managing a nation’s health
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has started an ambitious project to create a multibillion-pound national information structure, in which ILOG JRules will serve a vital role. Better IT is crucial to meeting Britain’s growing demand for higher quality healthcare. Last year, there were over 300 million primary care consultations in Britain. In 2002 and 2003, over 624 million prescription items were dispensed, and more than 5.3 million people were admitted to hospitals for treatment in the country.

For this project, called the National Program for IT, the NHS selected BT Syntegra (www.btsyntegra.com), the software consulting and system integration arm of British Telecom. BT Syntegra will design, build and manage a nationwide database for health records and a messaging service for conducting online transactions. Both systems will be critical to the NHS.

BT Syntegra will use ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to add important functionality to these systems and simplify their management. ILOG BRMS makes rule building accessible to both IT and nontechnical users, and its central repository allows rules to be shared among applications, reducing the time it takes to create and deploy rules.

Telenor
Service delivery time cut in half
The ability to promise fulfillment of customer orders faster than the competition is essential for maintaining and growing telecommunications market share. Telenor (www.telenor.com), Norway’s largest telecom group, expects to accelerate its service delivery by 50 percent with a new fulfillment process automation platform based on ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line.

Built by Teleca OSS, a major Swedish telecom system integrator, FLOW 2.0 uses ILOG JRules to provide a single platform for automating decision points throughout Telenor’s fulfillment workflow, and ensures compliance with customer preferences and contract rules. The new business process management system increases efficiency by empowering the telco to capture its best practices for order handling and fulfillment as business rules.

ILOG JRules also lets FLOW 2.0’s business users manage the application’s business logic for implementing the complex and rapidly changing factors that control the service delivery process. The rules are stored in a central repository for easy access, maintenance and cross-platform deployment. Service delivery is accelerated, as FLOW 2.0 streamlines the delivery of customer services and reduces Telenor’s reliance on employees to make most day-to-day decisions, helping the telco apply policies consistently and further ensure revenue from service operations.

“ILOG JRules’ user-friendly rule creation and edition interface allows our non-IT specialists to visualize the decisions made in the fulfillment processes and accordingly make changes to the platform, which means we can quickly respond to changes in our business,” says Nils-Petter Faugli, project manager at Telenor Networks. “ILOG JRules’ central repository enables our IT team to use the same rules across the overall product delivery process, which fits perfectly into our new component-based, process-oriented architecture.”

Industrial Bank of Korea
Need insurance with that?
South Korea’s new government-sanctioned “Bancassurance System” allows commercial banks to sell insurance to their customers. Adding new insurance products to existing financial offerings, however, poses significant costs, including training for employees.

The Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK: www.kiupbank.co.kr) has created a solution for handling the challenges of selling insurance by introducing an ILOG JRules-based application that makes real-time product and service recommendations. ILOG JRules is a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management (BRMS) product line.

“ILOG’s BRMS enabled us to introduce and maintain our Bancassurance System’s complex offerings,” says Im-Su Lee, general manager of IBK’s Bancassurance program, “and has given our frontline employees, including bank tellers and loan officers, access to real-time product and service information, helping us to meet our goal of providing the highest customer service.”

The new solution empowers bank employees to make sophisticated product and service recommendations by asking customers questions created with proprietary business rules. The system also reduces IT maintenance costs by giving business users a way to write business rules themselves, reducing the need for IT intervention.

IBK now offers 32 insurance products in cooperation with 10 insurance companies, including industry leaders Samsung Life Insurance, Kyobo Life Insurance, Daehan Life Insurance, Hyundai Marine and Fire Insurance, and Samsung Fire and Marine Insurance.

Dillinger Hütte
Flexible steel production
Successfully delivering custom products provides a profitable and sustainable differentiator in any industry. Dillinger Hütte has achieved this competitive advantage with ILOG JRules.

Dillinger Hütte (www.dillinger.de) prides itself on its ability to make steel plates in unique sizes and materials. It annually produces approximately 1,800 kilotons of heavy plates ranging widely in size, coating and alloy requirements. These plates have a considerable number of uses, from construction equipment and drilling platforms to tunnel walls and ship hulls.

Creating custom products always requires significant real-time fine-tuning in response to changing requirements. Dillinger Hütte has had to rely on a hard-coded system that did not adapt quickly to emerging production constraints. Now, the steel maker readily accommodates changes at the plant level, with a production management system based on ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line.

ILOG JRules lets employees in the production planning and quality assurance departments directly implement changes in production within a few hours and as business dictates. The improved responsiveness and agility also enable Dillinger Hütte to rapidly respond to faults in steel plates, minimizing scrap and shortening overall production time.

Dillinger Hütte can now set itself apart from competitors: “Using ILOG JRules, we are now able to easily and flexibly adjust and fine-tune our production processes as soon as production requirements change,” says Peter Zell, project leader at Dillinger Hütte.

Today, there is a set of ILOG JRules business rules for each production process, and the rules can be changed to meet individual customer requirements and specific quality assurance tests and processes, machine changes and exception handling. Additionally, using ILOG JRules helped Dillinger Hütte meet part of a larger initiative to move from a proprietary IT environment to one based on Java.

Japan Defense Agency
Cross-country visualization
Coordinating the activities of military units across a nation requires an advanced visualization system capable of displaying diverse assets and the status of operations in real time. For this, the Japan Defense Agency (JDA: www.jda.go.jp) has adopted ILOG Views to enhance the user interface of the Command Control System (CCS) used by Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF).

GSDF has more than 150 installations across Japan, and CCS lets the military service centrally monitor and command all of its units. In an emergency, CCS sends the units’ commanders critical information, helping to facilitate logistics and mission planning.

The new ILOG Views-driven CCS interface displays information in real time with great accuracy using realistic graphic objects. It improves and accelerates GSDF’s decision-making, and enables unit commanders to quickly assess an emergency and ascertain the status of an operation.

CCS is based on AP2000, a standard communications architecture that functions as an integrated framework for conveying emergency information to GSDF commanders. JDA selected ILOG Views because it was the only visualization tool able to make graphical elements that displayed fast enough on AP2000 to meet the agency’s performance requirements.