If you’ve missed the first few blog posts in this series, we’ve been covering “deadly policy administration sins” for property and casualty (P&C) providers.

Today’s blog post covers Sin #4: not fully understanding the impact of rule definition on system performance and maintainability.

We’ve been dealing with configurable systems since their inception. It has become clear that consideration needs to be given up front to the classes of rules required to support the uniquely complex demands of policy administration.

Early on, configurable systems simply allowed users to create Boolean statements: If…, Then…, Else… It soon became clear that many processing scenarios required complex rule definitions for this construct. In practice, these systems performed very poorly and became nearly as difficult to maintain, test and change as the legacy systems they were intended to replace.

The next evolution of configurable systems brought scripting languages and CASE tools, which relied on the premise that performance could only be improved by converting user input into fast-processing code. While these systems performed better than their earlier counterparts, the code was not always optimized for each processing situation and required developer skills — and time — to ensure the integrity of the applications. Again, the base concept of configuration was lost.

At Sapiens, experience has taught us that multiple rule types must be used alone, or in combination, to provide high performance and maintainable support for complex requirements. A policy administration platform must accommodate different types of rule processing situations with various rule constructs, potentially including special processing.

Of course, configuring rules requires the same higher-level thought as coding. If a solution only supports a single rule type, it’s likely to perform poorly in the real world as it forces every situation into the same paradigm. The complex requirements of a policy administration system necessitate multiple rule mechanisms for multiple situations.

That’s why Sapiens’ offerings were built with every eventuality in mind. They support broadly specified rules that need to be applied and evaluated quickly, as well as fine-grained rules that need to allow for a high degree of specificity. For information on all the P&C policy admin sins, please check out my white paper: The Seven Deadly Sins of P&C Policy Administration.

  • insurance
  • insurance industry
  • insurance software
  • insurers
  • policy administration
  • policy administration solution
  • property and casualty
  • rules definition
John Pettit

John Pettit John Pettit is the head of Sapiens’ North American P&C Insurance Platform, with nearly two decades of experience in the P&C insurance market. He previously served as the founder, CEO and president of Adaptik Corporation, a North American insurance software firm that was acquired by Sapiens.