First steps in implementing Corticon for OE insurance application - PUG Baltic Annual Conference 2017 - Martin Sandberg - Seesam

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First steps
in implementing Corticon
for OE insurance application
Seesam Insurance AS
Martin Sandberg
for PUG Baltic 2017

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Introductions
1.Seesam Insurance AS
- operating in three Baltic states
- does belong to OP-group (Finland)
2.Martin Sandberg, Baltic IT director
- working in Seesam IT since 1997
- has gained little bit understanding
in Insurance business
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What is Corticon?

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So what it is?
Corticon is Business Rules Management System
Its main functionality is to make decisions based on complex logic.
E.G.
Will we take this customer or risk?
What discount will we offer?
What special terms will be added to policy document?
What ....

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What is special in Corticon?
Corticon does stand out in family of BRMS systems by:
- Its execution speed
- Visulisation and half-automatic verification of rules
- Testing and debugging capabilities

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How we got
hooked?

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Meaning why we think Corticon is necessary?
Fast changing environment
Today speed is everything
Business-people technical
understanding level
Need for automation
based on complex logic
High cost of development
and even higher cost of
(messed up) changes

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How to get it?

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Making business case
BRMS business cases can be made on several grounds:
 Automation of tasks
 Development and change costs
 Faster speed-to-market
 Losses avoided due to not following written policies
 Rule completeness and conflict avoidance

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Working with Corticon

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Cooperation of business and IT in a BRMS
 Is it possible to skip IT altogether?
 Well, not really:
 Do Business users like to program?
 Programmers mind is needed to create structure of rulebase first
 Words like „Version management“ and „deployment“ ... ?
So what it is about then?
 Word of day is „COOPERATION“!
 BRMS does enable common understanding between IT and Business side
 With some bonuses... 

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Story of Seesam POC
 POC scope agreed with Progress. Ruleset was initially developed by Helmes
 Seesam did take over ruleset development
 Corticon was integrated into Seesam Insurance application
 Business case was made
 After Corticon was purchased production deployment was made based
 Few days later major algortihm (i.e. not parameter) changes
 Second product pricing done as well now

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Some technical points. Good findings.
 Built in logging
 Postgre, OpenEdge etc supported
 Few click table creation
 Fire and forget
 Rulebase is essentially bunch of XML files. If something cannot be done in
Developer UI it may be done in Notepad++
 If you write good rule messages, error finding and testing is incredibly easy
 Rule versioning

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Some technical points. Not that good findings
 Built in log again:
 When database has been unreachable log stops
 You need to define your own Postgre indexes if you ever want to search
logs
 Development Studio is slow sometimes.
 Each calculation is fast but system is slow?
 When null is not 0 and Empty date is not a ‘?’

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When to use Corticon not ABL?
 Is the business logic the result of relatively complex decision?
 Is the business logic customized by client?
 Are changes frequently required to the application business logic?
 Is quality / integrity of logic critical?
The more the ‘yes’ answers the better the fit for Corticon
(c) Progress for this slide

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Demo

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To sum it up
Steps of Seesam story were:
 Problems and Needs identified
 POC project completed
 Business case affirmed
 Deployment to production made
 Technical summary as well
Next steps:
 Gradually boardening the usage of Corticon in Seesam
 Involving more people & other processes

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Thank you
for your time!