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Development of Rating Infrastructure to support Web-based Quoting
ValueMomentum assists this P&C Carrier develop reusable services for Rating

Industry
Insurance

Client:
Leading Northeastern P&C Carrier

Needs addressed
Rating & Dynamic Pricing

• Our Client wanted to make available web-based quoting for its Workers' Compensation Line of Business and required a rating Infrastructure to support this initiative
• The rating capability was expected to be shared by two applications. One of those was the quoting application and the other was the policy administration application.
• Both of the “Requestor” applications i.e. Quoting and Policy administration were based on different technology environments (J2EE/Web and Mainframe technologies respectively)

Technology Solution delivered
Business Rules Management System (BRMS)

ValueMomentum was awarded a fixed-price and time contract and was responsible for the end-to-end implementation of this project.

• The responsibilities handled by ValueMomentum included:
  • ValueMomentum proposed an architecture using Reusable Components that could be leveraged to support rating infrastructure roll outs for additional Lines of Business
  • A layered and open design where each component specialized in performing certain task leading to the generation of a rate. This allowed the Customer to have more control over the overall application architecture and handle application maintenance requests in a more structured fashion by enabling the Carrier's staff to quickly locate areas within the application that needed adjustments / modifications / enhancements.
  • Performed business analysis to capture and document the various algorithms (rate calculation steps), manual rate, factors, formulae and rules that were integral to the rate determination process. This ensured that IT and Business stakeholders had a shared understanding of the requirements, rating process and acceptance criteria before the start of implementation.
  • Leveraged the Carrier's Calculation engine that maintained various rates, factors, control tables and formulae for the rating process.
  • Provided “easy-to-use” rate maintenance capability that could be used by rate maintenance staff
  • Also designed and developed as a “LOB Routing” service which would eventually become a common infrastructure for the various Lines of Business (LOBs) in the Customers' organization.
  • The LOB routing service was expected to interact with the Quoting application, which was common to most of the LOBs, and route the quotation request along with the submitted data to the appropriate (LOB) routing service.
  • A staggered Implementation roll out was suggested i.e. CRAWL… WALK, RUN which allowed a subset of the overall scope (an initial set comprising fewer states) to be implemented first. This allowed an infrastructure scaffold to be built that could be leveraged for subsequent waves. Through this approach, user feedback from each wave could be incorporated for subsequent waves, risk was reduced and business stakeholders' expectations were managed better.
  • Performed all life cycle steps right from Inception to Elaboration to Construction and Transition.

Execution model
At site, T&M

Technologies used
Ratabase Platform (Rate Calculation), J2EE, App Server, Web Services

Benefits delivered

• Successfully delivered the project on-time and within budget
• Significantly reduced maintenance costs while delivering the targeted functionality
• Managed stakeholder expectations and mitigated risks through implementation approach
• Enabled the Customer to leverage existing IT infrastructure, foster reusability while delivering accurate Quoting capabilities via the web

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