SMABTP Standardizes Insurance Policy Management With ILOG JRules
June 14 2005 - 4:00AM
PR Newswire (US)
SMABTP Standardizes Insurance Policy Management With ILOG JRules
BRMS Dramatically Reduces IT Change Cycles, Extends Partnership
Capabilities PARIS, June 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R)
(Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading
provider of enterprise software components and services, today
announced that SMABTP, the leading French insurance company in the
construction industry, has standardized on ILOG JRules(TM), a key
offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product
line, to effectively manage all the business rules governing its
insurance applications. Using ILOG's BRMS, SMABTP expects to reduce
IT maintenance costs, shorten the time-to-market of new products,
and better support its business partners. SMABTP has already
successfully deployed ILOG JRules in several applications,
including customer repository management and policy underwriting.
Due to increasing external regulatory and tax changes, as well as
new construction methods and materials that appear annually,
managing business policy changes in the construction insurance
business is an extremely complex process. SMABTP's aging legacy IT
systems could no longer cope with the requirements of this
ever-changing business environment while providing the necessary
level of agility, transparency and productivity. Using an
architecture in which business rules were buried in the legacy
systems, staying competitive required a lengthy IT change cycle.
Using ILOG JRules, SMABTP will be able to respond faster and more
cost-effectively to policy changes, as well as improve the
time-to-market for new products and services. This is possible
because a BRMS allows the business rules to be managed separately
from the rest of the application, allowing policy managers to make
changes to the application without heavy IT involvement, and
introduce new products and policies more quickly and
cost-effectively. "Introducing new underwriting rules was a complex
process which required three to four months to be implemented
versus two weeks now," said Jean-Michel Detavernier, SMABTP's
Director of IT Projects and Developments. "We dramatically enhanced
the responsiveness and the flexibility of our underwriting
application, which means better servicing our customers and
partners. We are also able to support compliance requirements in
the underwriting process by enabling underwriters to audit and
control the rules. As a matter of fact, one of the key drivers for
adopting JRules was improving collaboration between IT and business
users and productivity gains -- we feel we've met these
objectives." As a mutual insurance provider, SMABTP has built
strong business partnerships with other mutual insurers to leverage
core strengths. Consequently, SMABTP's IT systems must be able to
flexibly handle both its own business rules as well as those of its
partners, yet allow any of these rules to be easily updated so they
can effectively serve their mutual customers. SMABTP has adopted a
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for its IT systems and is using
ILOG JRules as a core part of this architecture to externalize and
manage all of the business rules of its insurance products and
create rule services for these processes. "Externalizing the
business logic to a BRMS has become a standard practice in our
company. We are porting existing applications to ILOG JRules so
that all new applications can leverage our new SOA," added
Detavernier. SMABTP and ILOG's Professional Services organization
worked together to develop the new SOA and rule-based architecture.
Applications are now being deployed in a modular fashion and aimed
at handling any insurance policy or claim using business rules
technology. SMABTP estimates that 80% of its IT architecture can be
written using business rules. ILOG JRules is currently used for
SMABTP's customer repository management and underwriting
applications, where business rules already drive data validation,
eligibility and risk assessment decisions. ILOG has consistently
built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the
industry's leading business rule software. ILOG was recently named
the BRMS market leader by IDC, and has been in the leader quadrant
of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines for three
years running. Customers of the award-winning ILOG JRules include
CitiStreet, VSP, eBay, Zurich, MetLife, Sabre and many other
leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide. About
SMABTP SMABTP is the leading French insurance company in the
construction industry. SMABTP insures construction companies,
construction projects, equipments, delivered buildings, enterprise
workers and enterprise managers. SMABTP offers also life and health
insurance policies. SMABTP belongs to SMABTP Group, which employs
more than 2 000 people and whose revenue amounted to 1,622 millions
of euros in 2004. For more details, please visit:
http://www.smabtp.fr/ About ILOG ILOG delivers software and
services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and
manage change and complexity. Over 2,000 global corporations and
more than 400 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's
market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), optimization
and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns
on investment, create market-defining products and services, and
sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and
employs more than 650 people worldwide. NOTE: ILOG is a registered
trademark, and JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All other trademarks
are the property of their respective owners. DATASOURCE: ILOG
CONTACT: Sarah Johansen of ILOG, Inc., +1-650-567-8128, or Web
site: http://www.smabtp.fr/ Web site: http://www.ilog.com/
Copyright