Keep It Simple, Make It Effective
Decision Research’s newest products interact with users through Excel, rather than proprietary interfaces, according to Stephen Korow.
Best’s Review: Where does your tool fit into actuaries’ daily work and how does that differ from some of the other solutions that are out there?
KOROW: The DecisionMaker Rating tool leverages the work that actuaries are already performing to model rating changes and new rate plans. Their work doesn’t change significantly. What changes is that downstream the work to produce that new rate plan for use by the enterprise has been automated. The DRC toolset extracts all constituent pieces of the rate plan that was modeled in Excel and generates a scalable standalone service to deliver premium calculations to the enterprise.
Automating the process of moving from the model to the callable service increases speed to market and reduces testing requirements.
BR: Is that the biggest weakness in today’s market, that products are too proprietary or not using the tools that actuaries already know?
KOROW: That is certainly one of the problems with the products on the market today. Either the actuary has to utilize a proprietary tool or someone in IT has to reproduce the actuary’s model. This process is inefficient and increases the likelihood of errors being introduced. DRC products empower the business people to run the business and the IT people to concentrate on technology. The actuary doesn’t have to learn rudimentary logic programming and the IT resources aren’t required to understand the intricacies of insurance rating.
BR: How does a solution like this impact training and documentation and support?
KOROW: Because we are leveraging an interface that an actuary or business analyst is already comfortable with for initial modeling (i.e. Excel), our customers have experienced a dramatic reduction in training and support of BAs and actuaries. Additionally, because the extraction and generation of the enterprise services from the Excel model has been automated, training and support of IT staff has been reduced. IT no longer has the burden of recoding the rate plan so that it can be integrated into their existing architecture. That work has been shifted to DRC tools which can immediately generate an enterprise-ready service from the original model. Boring, repetitive work is thereby moved from the IT staff to software. Documentation of all tables and equations created to generate premiums is also automatically generated from the system.
It is a win-win situation. The Sales and Product departments are happier because they can get rate changes and new products out the door much quicker. IT is happier because they can concentrate on researching new technologies to further increase the competitive advantage of the company instead of expending resources to maintain the current system. Management is happier because the company is more efficient and bottlenecks to growth and increased profitability have been removed.
By empowering the business users and IT resources to concentrate on their areas of expertise, we enable the organization to be more efficient and successful.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30