Play It by the Rules

Subramanian and his team explored all the possibilities available in the market and then zeroed in on a rules engine -- a novel concept for the insurance industry.

A rules engine is a graphical business rules development environment that reduces maintenance and enhancement costs by cleanly separating business rules from application code. It comes with productivity enhancements that detect errors and conflicts automatically. But Subramanian was not sure where to go for a rules engine that would fit his requirements.

"We evaluated ready-made packages in the market. These were inflexible and did not meet our requirements in features, availability and modeling capabilities. We needed something that was rapidly configurable and would work with minimum IT resources," explains Subramanian.

The company formed a cross-functional team, which comprised two to three people each from IT, business and sales support. The hunt for a vendor began.