CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

CitiStreet
The rules of benefits
CitiStreet is one of the largest global benefits delivery firms in the United States, serving more than 9 million participants and administering approximately $215 billion in assets. Outside the United States, CitiStreet (www.citistreetonline.com) has about 1 million participants and administers approximately $9 billion in assets. Options vary greatly between benefit plans, and the laws and policies that govern these plans are constantly changing. ILOG JRules gives CitiStreet a significant competitive advantage by enabling the company to respond quickly to customers’ ever-changing needs.

To streamline the administration of complex benefit programs for its Global 2000 clients, CitiStreet has adopted ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS). Now, CitiStreet has the flexibility to more quickly build and deploy new applications, as well as update existing ones at lower cost.

“No two benefit plans are alike,” says Andy Marsh, senior vice president of client project management at CitiStreet. “Because of the dynamic nature of benefit services and the high volume of transactions, we needed advanced business rule management software to cost-effectively respond to increasingly complex customer requests. With ILOG JRules, we have a solution that scales as our business requirements change, while supporting CitiStreet’s need to exchange and manage employee information in real time.”

The Economical Insurance Group (Economical: www.economicalinsurance.com) has adopted ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), to provide this kind of turnaround time and reduce costs in meeting policy requests.

Economical is one of the largest property and casualty insurance companies in Canada, with more than $1.7 billion in premium volume and $3.3 billion in assets and personal lines of business. The company chose ILOG JRules to automate a highly complex underwriting process and deliver greater accuracy, speed and transparency for such key processes as eligibility determination, risk assessment and regulatory compliance.

ILOG JRules also delivers business rule authoring and management features that support Economical as it expands its business and implements ever-changing policies and regulations. For example, the BRMS includes a central repository that lets policy managers update business rules without taking an underwriting system offline. Instead, the application taps the repository for rules when processing a request, automatically applying the latest ones.

“Underwriting is a highly rules-driven process,” says John Martin, CIO of Economical, “and by extending rule management capabilities to our actuaries and business analysts, Economical can better align its business strategies with IT objectives.”

Option One Mortgage Corporation
Streamlined mortgage lending
Changes in internal policies and external regulations make it challenging for mortgagers to deliver loans fast. This is why Option One Mortgage Corporation (www.oomc.com), a U.S. residential mortgage lender and a subsidiary of H&R Block Inc., has built its new mortgage prequalification system using ILOG JRules, the market-leading business rule management system (BRMS).

Option One selected ILOG JRules to provide consistently excellent service. The company also took advantage of ILOG’s Lending Practice to have an ILOG Professional Services team quickly identify ways to leverage existing technology.

Option One used the flexible BRMS to update a system for prequalifying potential borrowers. Partner mortgage brokers access the new system through a secure, 24-hour website to quickly prequalify clients and determine which loan products to offer. The system has been so successful that Option One plans to use it in its next-generation Automated Underwriting Decision System, a full-scale underwriting application.

“We chose ILOG JRules for its robust scalability as well as its ability to automate complex decision processes and do so accurately, ensuring there is a consistent experience at all touch points,” says Allan Lubitz, senior vice president and CIO at Option One. “ILOG’s technology is an excellent fit.”

Consumers love the variety in the mobile phone market. If one carrier does not have what they want, they switch to another one. Vodafone Spain (www.vodafone.es) is working to give its customers no reason to change services – and winning new customers at the same time. Using ILOG JRules, the leading business rule management system, Vodafone Spain is building a centralized promotions platform that will serve more than 10 million customers.

“Churn,” or the switching of customers from one service to another, is a significant concern for mobile phone operators. In their highly competitive market, the only way to stay in the running is to continuously deliver new products, services and promotions.

Using ILOG JRules, Vodafone plans to enhance its customer acquisition and loyalty programs, and boost sales during traditionally slow periods by rapidly introducing new promotions. It also plans to offer promotions online for the first time through a new rule-based system, called New Platform of Integrated Promotions. It will reduce the time to market for new promotions, and facilitate the creation of new and innovative offerings.

Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group Plc., the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company. In Germany, Vodafone D2 uses ILOG JRules in a real-time rating solution for billing applications.

Mining and blending ores to achieve specific grades and lower production costs is a complex undertaking that leaves many mining companies with few options. The world’s largest diversified resources company, BHP Billiton (www.bhpbilliton.com), has increased its number of options by implementing a mine-scheduling solution using ILOG CPLEX, the leading mathematical programming technology.

With ILOG CPLEX, BHP Billiton has achieved cost savings amounting to millions of dollars. It has also shortened the time it takes to generate a schedule to just a few days, and has the freedom to experiment with what-if analysis. Today, the company can produce complete solutions to problems it couldn’t solve five years ago.