IDIOM Decision Suite - Configurable Product
Industry Context
This document presents the concept of Configurable Product in an insurance industry context. The reader should be aware, however, that the concept can be applied in any industry which has rule-based processes that can be defined and executed electronically, including the document centric processes that are common throughout the financial services industry.
In the insurance sector, the business case for ‘Configurable Product’ is supported by the following quote from Gartner Group:
Competition is driving insurers to quickly create and launch new insurance products, often without the necessary supporting infrastructures. New technical solutions, such as product configurators, can assist....Approximately 40 percent of Type A insurers in the United States will purchase or build new product configuration capability by year-end 2004...
This paper will assume that the reader accepts that a business case exists for Configurable Product. The paper therefore focuses on how such a goal could be achieved, rather than on the merits or otherwise of the case.
Key Issues
To achieve Configurable Product, some key issues must be resolved.
- New and changed products must be managed separately from other more static parts of the system.
- New and changed products must integrate fully and seamlessly into the supporting infrastructure, both technical (running without modification on any platform) and business (fully integrated for instance with customer, channel and accounting business infrastructure).
- The impact of implementing Configurable Product on the existing infrastructure must be minimized. The cost, risk and effort required for wholesale replacement of an existing environment (or even major parts of it) is insurmountable for most large businesses.
- The appropriate business layer at which the configurable approach is applied needs to be determined. There may be a good case for improving the development profile of externally defined ('real-world') business objects such as customers, channel and/or business partners, accounts and staff, but our concept of configurable product does not extend to this business infrastrucure layer. Therefore our discussion will assume that these `business infrastructure objects' continue to be developed and managed as per the status quo, however this may be achieved (the SDLC, packages etc.)
The following diagram illustrates how a Configurable Product server can be implemented as a `proxy' container into an existing environment. The proxy provides services to support the newly defined Configurable Product.
Figure 1: Configurable Product is a plug-in component for the host application