CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Thames Water
Savings flow from business rules
Transferring the legal ownership of property or land in the United Kingdom requires, among other things, up-to-date information from the local water utility. Thames Water (www.thameswater.co.uk) receives more than 250,000 “conveyancing” requests annually, costing the world’s third largest water utility several million British pounds in administrative costs each year.

To improve service and save both time and money, Thames Water has streamlined its conveyancing software suite from six applications to just one powered by ILOG JRules, ILOG’s leading business rule management system (BRMS). The utility has been able to reduce the number of employees who administer this service, and can now immediately address new customer requirements, product enhancements and regulations.

Thames Water expects to save more than £3 million in handling conveyancing requests over the next five years, and generate about £1.4 million over the same period by detecting under-billed properties.

“With over 250,000 conveyancing requests submitted every year, it is imperative that the handling system is able to process applications as quickly as possible,” says Peter Kaye, operations manager at Thames Water Asset Data Services. “There is no scope for hold-up, so any changes we need to make to the assessment criteria need to be integrated into the system promptly. ILOG JRules provides us with the flexibility we need to meet this objective.”

Amadeus Destino provides real-time information from more than 65 tour operators in Germany and Austria. It offers everything needed to sell a holiday package, including direct booking. Travel agents enter the customer’s preferences, and Amadeus Destino does the rest.

As travel agencies compete fiercely against online services today, they need fast, reliable solutions for finding and reserving tours. Amadeus Destino fully supports travel agencies, and has the added advantage of reducing the likelihood of mistakes inherent in manual systems.

“ILOG JRules provides the greatest flexibility for our system,” says Wolfgang Klein, director of business unit development at Amadeus Germany, “while significantly alleviating the maintenance costs and effort of a system subject to frequent changes.”

Founded in 1971, Amadeus Germany is a leading provider of comprehensive products for making travel services available through such diverse channels as travel agencies, call centers and the Internet. In Germany, 85 percent of the travel agencies use Amadeus Germany’s advanced online services to do business with hotels, airlines, tour operators, car rental companies and other travel services.

Whittle Consulting
Mining for greater profits
Getting the most out of a mine requires careful planning and scheduling that takes advantage of the location and concentration of metals within the ore body, the flexibility of the digging equipment and the performance characteristics of the ore extraction plant. It’s a complicated problem. All of these factors must be coordinated over the life of the mine in the context of the expected market conditions to achieve the greatest return on investment.

Whittle Consulting (www.whittleconsulting.com.au) specializes in modeling, analyzing and optimizing complex mining and mineral processing operations. Their aim is to maximize their mining customers’ business performance by intelligently combining research, mathematics, computing and business planning. Whittle applies its expertise to provide insights that increase the value of their customers’ investments many times over.

ILOG CPLEX is a key component in Whittle’s software solutions. The company uses ILOG’s leading mathematical programming technology to create optimal mining schedules that minimize costs and increase revenues. The powerful optimizer takes a Whittle model developed for a mine and formulates long-term plans that meet both operational and corporate objectives.

Whittle applies ILOG CPLEX to problems that typically have as many as 250,000 constraints and variables. The consultancy focuses on the interaction among operations, infrastructure and economics. The result can be a gain of 5 to 15 percent in net present value for a mine or portfolio of mines.

“ILOG CPLEX is at the heart of our business,” says Gerald Whittle, co-owner of Whittle Consulting, “allowing us to solve huge problems very quickly and help improve our customers’ bottom line significantly. It gives us – and them – a competitive advantage.”

Powered by ILOG JRules, the new end-to-end Web-based Selling System has taken Freddie Mac (www.freddiemac.com) to the winners’ circle for the 2005 Application Development Trends Innovator Awards.

For 11 years, ADT magazine (www.adtmag.com) has given Innovator Awards to IT departments in recognition of their successful development and implementation of innovative applications that deliver significant business and financial benefits. Freddie Mac took this year’s Component-Based Development award for creating a loan processing system that fulfills their objective of “any loan, any customer, in a day.”

Selling System provides a single Web-based platform that supports all the transaction activities in the loan life cycle, including purchasing, pricing, and contract creation. It represents a fundamental redesign of Freddie Mac’s existing processes and technical infrastructure, replacing legacy systems that have been in use for more than a decade. Selling System gives lending institutions more flexibility in selling loans to Freddie Mac and allows them to serve more home buyers. Crucial to Freddie Mac’s success has been integrating core business policies as business rules. This provides flexibility for implementing policies in a business language. It has also helped Freddie Mac roll out Selling System via a measured “iterative development approach,” which allows users to shape the system’s evolution and refinement by providing real-time feedback.

To gain this flexibility, Freddie Mac adopted ILOG JRules. The market-leading business rule management system enables policy managers to implement decisions as business rules through an easy-to-use rule editor. The rules are stored separately, so they can be modified without pulling Selling System offline.