The ProductWriter̉ Toolset

 

A key requirement of efficient electronic commerce is to ease implementation and cut processing costs by eradicating duplication of work.  Polaris supports this by firstly setting standards for the insurance community to adhere to and also by supplying a toolset, which can be used to define insurance products in a standard format.

 

The ProductWriterâ software provides insurers and underwriting agencies with a means to accurately and fully specify insurance products, and an environment in which such products can be implemented easily within a wide range of systems, eg brokers software packages, web sites etc.  Thus many different products and versions of those products can be created, maintained and distributed.  Once the insurance product has been created in ProductWriterâ it can be tested using other components of the toolset prior to distribution to one or more integrators.  These integrators will use the Run Time Environment (RTE) software provided by Polaris to actually run the insurance products which have been supplied by insurers as illustrated below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

          

 

 

 

              ProductWriter® and the Run Time Environment

 

 

Data Dictionary

 

One of the fundamental ways of ensuring industry standards is that ProductWriterâ uses an active data dictionary to drive the product definition.  It gives exact meanings to all the terms that may appear in a product specification and enforces data validation rules.  To also assist the implementation of the standards skeleton schemes are supplied which provide a framework insurance product for product writers to use as a starting template and modify as they wish.  The agreed business processes across the following phases of the business cycle are covered by the dictionary and the processing framework:

 

§         Quotations

§         New Business

§         Mid-term amendments

§         Renewals

§         Cancellations

 

The Toolset

 

The key facilities of the ProductWriterâ toolset are:

 

§         Creates tables to hold base rates, loadings and discounts in tabular format. Existing tables can be imported from an external source.

§         Enables access to industry standard data lists, such as the ABI code lists, which can be grouped according to the requirements of the product.

§         Creates a set of product rules for areas such as risk acceptance, calculating the premium payable and determining applicable terms & conditions.

§         Design and print forms to be used at point of sale such as proposals, cover notes and certificates

§         Testing tools are provided to help with all areas of testing during the product life cycle such as unit, acceptance and regression testing.

§         Produce a range of reports on data dictionaries, schemes and forms

§         Generate files for use with industry standard EDI messages

 

In addition various maintenance facilities at both dictionary and scheme level are available.

 

To ensure Insurers are able to write efficient schemes Training courses in the use of ProductWriterâ are available. Details are given in the ‘Training’ section of this site.

 

A Full Specification of the required hardware and software configuration recommended for running ProductWriterâ is available.