The insurance industry must overcome multiple challenges and relentless change. Manual practices, employee turnover and the loss of tacit knowledge, disjointed processes, speed to market constraints, lack of audit trails in light of regulatory changes and inefficient systems are just a few hurdles insurance companies and their employees must overcome.

These issues continue to have a significant impact on a company's ability to maintain its competitive edge and reduce costs while improving profitability.

Array Technology can help insurance companies build flexible applications that enhance their operational efficiency, optimize processes and improve customer retention and acquisition. Array Technology goes beyond basic automation when adding decision capabilities throughout core processes and across lines of business. Array technology ensures consistence across platforms and organizational units and deliver an unprecedented technology that minimizes time to market and eliminates inconsistent and contradictory business logic.

Insurance Companies can rely on Array Technology to enhance their core processes while achieving significant ROI in areas such as policy administration, underwriting, rating, claims processing, billing and payment, distribution, asset management and annuities.

Property and casualty, health and life insurance companies will be able to gain some of these advantages using Array Technology:

• Achieve speed to market gains
• Increase pass-through-rates
• Reduce claims leakage resulting in millions of Euros in savings
• Accurately assess risk on a consistent basis
• Improve compliance monitoring
• Obtain audit trails throughout the process and across lines of business
• Empower business users with the ability to manage rules with permission-based access
• Gain efficiency through centralized rule management
• Create flexible and responsive systems

Array Technology provides advanced rule management and authoring capabilities designed to empower both business professionals and developers. It includes features such as permission-based access control, metadata, history management, versioning, a central rule repository, high-performance rule engine and no-code approach to building business rules for business users with a point-and-click user-interface, capabilities to perform what-if scenarios, reporting and a variety of rule maintenance tools.

Insurance Companies can leverage their existing IT investments including legacy platforms, open technologies and industry data standards. Recognized for its world-leading ease-of-use and integration, Array Technology supports both real-time and batch processing.

Insurance companies of all types and sizes can rely on Array Technology to automate decision capabilities across their insurance processes.

Dedicated business and technology support

Array Technology provides complete services for consulting, education and customer support. Array Technology's award winning and world patented industry leading technology along with professional domain expert support help insurance companies build cutting-edge applications faster and with the greatest returns. Array Technology consultants work side by side with customers to guarantee their success with our software.

Benefits

• Shorten Time-To-Market
  Because the need for involving an IT department in the deployment process and the design of the business logic is removed, the time-to-market is considerably reduced. Advanced constraint analysis ensures that the constraints are consistent and conflicts do not occur.
  
  
• Speed of first application deployment
  Insurance companies can improve accuracy and consistency across its underwriting processes without having to go through the expense and complexity of modifying legacy systems - while saving up to an estimated 60% of what it usually costs to develop analytic applications and deploying them five times faster.
  
  New and updated models can be added to the underwriting capability without programming, and business rules can be modified in minutes by nontechnical underwriting staff, saving the company an estimated 75% in application maintenance expense.
  
  
• Assess claims and underwritings on a consistent basis
  Manual processing of claims, disjointed processes, rapidly changing policies and subjective assessment of claims and underwritings can result in customers with the same profile getting different advice by different advisors in different units in the organization. Array Technology business rules can be deployed to ensure a consistent processing.
  
  
• Improve legislation compliance
  With a central rules repository, that all applications across platforms and media share, it is easy to immediately update business critical business rules such as new legislation.
  
  
• Audit trails that can be reused with older or newer rule bases and analysis
  User actions and choices can be persisted independent of the business logic, and can thus be applied to earlier, later or alternate versions of the business logic for analysis or what-if scenarios. Because of the way the business logic is handled by the advanced Array Technology Runtime Environment, end users can consult rules in any order desired, which means that certain trends such as importance of certain characteristics in a claim or underwriting can become clear to the organization. Advanced conflict resolution allows users to choose options rendered illegal due to previous choices, and then return to a legal state without having to go back to the beginning. Only the choices in conflict are resolved. These conflicts can provide valuable information about combinations that many end users try to obtain in vain.
  
  
• Reusable centralized and versioned rules repository and management
  Business logic is maintained through a very simple to use constraint modeling environment, where models are kept in a central versioning system such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Subversion or CVS. Constraint models are compiled into a compact binary format that can be easily distributed and deployed to servers or hand held units. The same binary deployment file can be used on a number of platforms such as handheld units, laptops and desktops, servers, info kiosks to ensure consistency across the organization. The Runtime Environment supports all major development platforms as well by providing native API's for C++, COM, Java, .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0 and .NET Compact Framework.
  
  
• What if scenario analysis in underwriting with automatic suggestions
  The rules engine allows for easy comparison of different scenarios. It is easy to apply existing user information or user input to another scenario to see the effect of a potential change in policy or claim type. These what-if scenarios can be examined by end customers using self service websites that employ the exact same rules base as internal systems.
  
  
• High performance cross platform rules engine for reuse
  API's are available in an array of native platform API's. We support C++, COM, Java, .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0 and .NET Compact Framework in the runtime environment. All API's use the exact same binary representation of the logical model. This ensures that the logic is interpreted in exactly the same way regardless of platform and application. This consistency is paramount when sending salespeople on the road in a disconnected environment or when allowing end customers to access the logic through a self service kiosk. Models can also contain rules to limit certain people's possibilities. Thus a sales person in training can only sell certain policies or self service kiosks only offer certain products or push certain products that a senior sales representative is not met with. The rule base is the same for all scenarios, but based on roles or client applications the rules allow different things.
  
  
• Minimalistic design insures a compact and fast architecture
  Array Technology won the Microsoft Minimalistic Design award in December 2006. Minimalistic and simple does not mean less powerful. On the contrary it can mean that something is much more powerful because the time it takes to integrate it into the organization both in terms of technical integration and training of internal resources.
  
  Four key benefits of the minimalistic design are:
  • Least legacy invasive integration
  • Ease of use
  • Simple Runtime API
  • Extremely small disk and memory footprint

Quote from Microsoft
"The committee gave the award to Array because of its unprecedented and outstanding configuration technology. Array's technology represents the very essence of minimalistic design, a design concept that the MDCC is keen on adhering to.

By solving core constraint problems and removing complexity from application design, Array Technology has made life easier for both developers and end users alike. The patented constraint engine pre-compiles model data into an extremely compact format using array based mathematical principles. Product descriptions, created by domain specialists in the intuitive Array Studio, are accessed through the uniquely simple and lightweight Runtime API ensuring that developers can interact with the product data using only a few generic method calls.

Technology has a tendency to become unnecessarily complex and obscure. That is why customers have chosen to use Array Technology, and why Microsoft honored Array with Minimalistic Design Award."

• Removes complexity from application design
  The simple and generalized API's remove the need for developers to implement the business logic into applications. The API has 9 central methods which is all it takes to interact with the binary models created by the business analysts. In addition to these central methods a number of analysis and other tools are also available to the developer through the API. This very simple API makes it a simple task for developers to implement Array Technology Runtime into an existing legacy application, as a support tool to a legacy application or in new applications. Once implemented there is no need to rely on technical personnel when only the business logic changes. The result is applications that do not contain hard coded business logic, which has been handed down through a number of organizational layers to a developer with little or no concept of tacit knowledge contained in the business rules implemented. This eliminates a lot of buggy and error prone applications.
  
  
• Removes difficult knowledge transfer between Business Analysts and IT Developers
  Business analysts own a lot of the knowledge that insurance companies make their living off. This knowledge is tacit and very hard to document, so it can be transferred to the organization from the business analyst. It is even harder to transfer this knowledge to a developer, who has to implement this knowledge into an application. The more organizational boundaries the knowledge has to cross before it can go into an application, the larger the risk of knowledge corruption. When this knowledge is transferred as a binary file, containing all the information needed for a developer to asses all possible situations without having to implement the logic using code, these risks are completely eliminated.  The risk of "feature creep" and spaghetti code as a result of years of changes and exceptions in business logic is also kept to a minimum. All this is taken care of by the business analyst in the Array Technology Studio modeling environment.
  
  
• Removes hard coded logic and tacit knowledge by documenting corporate knowledge
  When the business logic is maintained in the Array Technology Studio modeling environment the business logic is also automatically documented. Training manuals and documentation manuals can be generated based on the rule repository. The knowledge is transferred from the business analyst to the organization.
  
  
• Automatically trigger suggestions, alternatives and mandatory external examinations
  While processing a claim or underwriting the rules can automatically trigger other suggestions or alternatives to the current policy. If certain information requires a medical exam this can be triggered. If desired the form can even suggest or require that one out a subset of approved doctors should perform the exam.
  
  
• Start in any order
  One of the strengths of the Array Technology Business Rules Engine is that all possible outcomes are evaluated at design time. This yields a number of advantages to other constraint technologies or business process management systems. One of these is that we can start anywhere in the process we want to. This way the end user can start with what he or she finds most important regardless of what the business analyst finds most important. The end result will never be compromised or violate any of the rules or constraints set up by business analyst. If a the user tries to violate any rules, the advanced conflict resolution makes sure that the user is guided back to a legal state in the easiest and least time consuming way. Because the complete solution space is known, the Runtime Environment also knows exactly what choices are in conflict, and presents the user with legal alternatives to the choices made. Unlike many other business rules engines the user does not need to step back to a state where the desired choice is legal, potentially undoing a lot of choices that have had no impact in the conflict. This way the user is guided safely and fast through providing the most possible information in a consistent and correct way.
  
  
• Guided advisors based on central rule repository
  Based on the exact same set of rules as all the rest of the organization, self service guided advisors or claims reporting tools can be made available to the end user. The behavior and result of the guides is controlled completely from the central rules repository.
  
  
• Non code approach to writing business logic
  The business analysts can design and maintain the central rules repository. The development is done using the Array Technology Studio application, where the models are built using import tools from existing ERP systems, drag & drop and simple point and click operations.
  
  The first, if not primary, obstacle encountered when working with constraint solvers or business rules engines is to understand and accurately describe the problem. The Array Compiler has fundamental advantages over other technologies in its wide selection of variable types, declarative (rather than procedural) language and extensive use of easily comprehendible truth tables.
  
  A generic full-featured and auto-generated user interface allows for quick interaction with the compiled model to test and simulate the expressed rules before deployment.
  
  More important than the relatively trivial task of editing a model is the ability to analyze, debug and evaluate relations prior to deployment. With solution spaces commonly expressed in powers of ten, brute force approaches must make way to an analytical approach, such as that offered by the integrated Analyzer.
  
  The Array Compiler which is integrated into the Array Studio or is available as an API or stand alone application is designed to solve all problems involving modeling, and analysis of complex logical models and should be considered as a general finite-domain constraint-solver. The Compiler generates binaries that allow the Array Runtime to handle large-scale constraint problems in real time.
  
  Complexity is solved at compile-time. The Array Compiler solves the constraint problem and guarantees that all solutions are addressable in real time by the Array Runtime.
  
  The Compiler supports variables of a variety of types. Everything from text strings to floating-point values and even "infinite" ranges of floating point values can be expressed and constrained. The Compiler automatically breaks infinite ranges into its discrete logical elements in order to solve the configuration problem, but does no impose this sampling on the end-user.
  
  
• Deploy without interference from or dependency on IT Department
  Because applications can be built to interact with an array binary file in a generic manner, the rules models can be changed and redeployed without ever having to bother the IT department.
  
  
• Advanced conflict handling
  At compile time the complete solution space is evaluated. With solution spaces commonly expressed in powers of ten, this means that even business analysts and experts can have a hard time gaining a complete overview of the possibilities available.
  
  The Runtime effectively prevents conflicts through its complete and continuous overview of the full solution space, but also provides powerful tools to resolve explicit (forced) conflicts.
  
  The Array Runtime environment has fundamental advantages over other technologies because it can solve conflicts where they occur and even solve conflicts that are derived from a number of rules not explicitly expressed by the business analyst.
  
  
• Automatic consistency check
  Successful compilation of a model guarantees completeness at runtime but is also a validation of the specified input. Not only does it guarantee that a solution exist, it can also tell if specific options are un-constrained, or worse, bound regardless of user input. Many first time configurator users will find sales-inhibiting inconsistencies in their products they never knew existed.
  
  
• Proven and versatile technology
  Array based logic is proven discipline that has been researched by universities since the nineteen forties. Array Technology has existed more than ten years and has a large portfolio of satisfied clients.
  
  
• Technology designed to satisfy the following requirements, even for large-scale constraint problems:
  • Completeness (all constraints must be taken into account at all times)
  • Compactness (a compact, yet complete representation)
  • Real-time capability (all logical consequences deduced in real time)
    
    
  • Comprehensive support for legacy data
    The Array Studio environment allows the business analyst to import legacy data from existing ERP systems, and also coexist with legacy systems. Existing business rules can often be converted if not fully, then with very little manual work.
    
    
  • Advanced constraint analysis
    Debug and evaluate relations prior to deployment. With solution spaces commonly expressed in powers of ten, brute force approaches must make way to an analytical approach, such as that offered by the integrated Analyzer.
    
    
  • By implementing a next-generation new business process, Celent estimates a typical carrier that issues 40,000 policies a year could save more than US$1.3 million annually ( link)
    
    
  • Expand pricing tiers to accommodate a wider range of customers while controlling risk
    
    
  • Gives the possibility to optimize prices - find the right price for each group
    By letting the price be a part of the business rules layer it is possible to let the customer choose the best priced insurance or by using this to perform analysis on existing customer data prices can be optimized to match the level the market can carry.
    
    
    
    
  • Increased complexity of member level processing
    Add any level of complexity and make the customer levels as fine grained as desired without impacting performance. Because all rules and constraints are evaluated at compile time, there is no need to explicitly consulting every rule at runtime. The derived result of all rules combined is what is contained in the resulting binary file. This also ensures a consistent and known worst case response time for every model.
    
    
  • Automatic colligation, decomposition and normalization of relational tables
    By basing the technology on Array Based Logic we gain a set of advantages over other technologies. One of these advantages is the way we compactly and efficiently store the business rules and data in our binary files. The complete solution space is represented compactly in terms of one or more nested data arrays. The array representation of the system model makes it possible to address the complete solution space by simple table look-up and coordinate indexing. These arrays are created by colligating (e.g. joining) interconnected relations or rules yielding the solution space of the entire system. The colligation process is done according to a fixed set of mathematical algorithms that automatically ensures that the data is completely normalized.
    
    Without going further into the mathematics the result of this is sub-millisecond lookups in even very large rule bases, and file sizes of only a few of kilobytes. This basically means that we can provide real-time consultation of all business rules on even handheld devices.
    
    
  • Disconnected deployment still protects business intelligence from reverse engineering
    Another advantage of basing the on Array Based Technology is the automatic obfuscating of the business logic. Because all the logic in the model is evaluated at compile time and stored compactly in nested arrays there is no way of performing reverse engineering on the business logic. The arrays are when simplified, basically large matrices of zeroes and ones with a large number of dimensions, a dimension for each variable in the model. All the Runtime environment has to do is consult the matrices using a vector and make sure that no zeroes are on the path of the vector. This cannot be traced back to the rules written by the business analyst.
    
    
  • Automate most common underwriting decisions
    Automate underwriting decisions using rules and analytics, so they can focus limited resources on exceptional cases that require more time to assess. Setting up a Personal History Questionnaire as an online application based on a set of business rules defined in Array Technology that asks for more information based on user input could tell a customer to request a medical examiners report based solely on the input if this input requires it, thus making sure a customer has all information at hand needed before talking to a sales representative.
    
    Some questionnaires might point to some common decisions based directly on the response given, where certain hazardous professions would automatically result in an acceptance with exclusion.
    
    This enables the application to precisely assess risks using advanced predictive analytics and sophisticated rules thus improving underwriting margins by saving time assessing risks.
    
    
  • Gain a better understanding of the sources and drivers of risk in client operations and assets, so they can lower loss.
    
    
  • Demonstrate to reinsurers their ability to rate their book with accuracy and consistency, so they can drive down reinsurance rates
    
    
  • Gain consolidated access to data to simplify and reduce the cost of underwriting decisions
    
    
  • Standardize and automate underwriting decisions to improve efficiency, expand capacity and ensure discipline