policy

Recommendation Engines- not as Complicated as You Think

July 15, 2009

Some time ago I saw this interesting little post -Recommendation Engine Secrets We Don’t Want You to Know: It’s not as Complicated as We’d Have You Think – that made the point that:
Most recommendation engines use one of a handful of methods that are well understood
And they are correct, of course. Recommendation engines involve some [...]

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Making complex policies visual for the web

July 1, 2009

Another session at Brainstorm, this time a case study from Genentech. Genentech has many policy documents that are interrelated, complex and lengthy and yet essential to operations – employees must understand them and follow them. As Genentech has made progress on its process management initiative it has found that getting the participants in the process [...]

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More on Business Rules in Legacy Modernization

May 18, 2009

Cyrus Montakab posted on Business Rules in Legacy Modernization recently in response to a post of mine and I wanted to respond to it. I wanted to respond in particular to his comment that:
even for the modules that can be fitted into a business rule, is it viable to re-architect re-factor the existing COBOL code [...]

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First Look – DeltaR onRules

April 22, 2009

Delta-R‘s product onRules is Java-based, service oriented application. Based on open source like the Spring, Hibernate, Java Server Faces r UI, Groovy for scripting etc. It is fully web based – thin client – and the resulting services are deployed as web services. It is available in English and Spanish.
The software starts with a tree/pane [...]

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A reader asks – how to document decision logic

April 9, 2009

I got an interesting question last week:
In you experience do you believe that the rules editors will become self documenting tools and, if so, is there any danger to this?
With regard to products I have used in the past I am not convinced they have evolved sufficiently to do this and I always see users [...]

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Designing and implementing a web-based warranty system

March 12, 2009

Frank Kozlowski of Kohler presentedf on a web-based warranty system. When they set out to develop the system their goals were to move to a start-of-the-art, easy to use system that was web-based so dealers could enter claims directly anywhere in the world (they have 12,000 dealers). They wanted to reduce their cycle time from [...]

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Warranty Management – New rules to apply

March 11, 2009

Rob Pritchard of Infosys presented on the power of business rules in warranty. His focus is on agility – most warranty systems are inflexible and hard to change. Organizations cannot make changes to warranty policy to respond to competitors, can’t create what-if scenarios, can’t tighten claims control or pre-valid claims or repairs. These problems come [...]

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Harnessing and Coordinating Warranty Best Practices in a Global Enterprise

March 11, 2009

Terry Adams of Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of Trane, presented on harnessing and coordinating warranty best practices. IR includes Trance, Thermo King, Schlage, Steelcraft and others for about $17B worldwide. All these acquisitions have experience and systems so Ingersoll Rand has a vision of a Business Operating System to drive common [...]

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Measuring and improving an effective and efficient warranty process

March 11, 2009

John Hagen of Trane presented on measuring and improving an effective and efficient warranty process. Trane produces Commercial HVAC systems of every size. Warranty is tricky because they make everything so specific to customers.
Trane started a new quality initiative in 2004 because they felt that there were some low hanging fruit. They had warranty reserves [...]

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When the customer knocks you need decision management not operational BI

March 10, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
A friend passed on an article titled “When the customer knocks” in which Scott Arnett of Pitney Bowes discussed the power of data to improve customer interactions. Nothing there to cause me to blog you would think. Except that Scott, like too many in the Business Intelligence community, fails to acknowledge that using [...]

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First Look Tavant

March 6, 2009

Some weeks back I got a review on Tavant, a 700 person IT services and solutions company with a focus in financial services (mortgage, trading and security), ebusiness and Service Operations such as warranty management. I was interested in their warranty product as part of my research into the warranty claims space. The product – [...]

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Here’s what different in next generation warranty systems

March 5, 2009

Continuing some posts on next generation warranty systems in the build up to speaking at the Warranty Chain management conference I thought I would contrast how current generation warranty systems handle critical decisions with how next generation systems do so.

Decision
Today
Next Generation

Is Claim Valid?
Data validation rules are coded into the user interface that captures [...]

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Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them)

March 5, 2009

One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. People want to know so they can design their system and so they can manage change. I recently got a request for a link to a post describing the difference and I realize that, though I have lots of posts [...]

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Decision Management and software development II – Model Driven Engineering

February 13, 2009

Continuing this weeks posts on using decision management to improve development,  I thought I would post on how decision management should be part of model-driven development (model-driven engineering, a model-driven architecture or whatever).
The recent, and premature, discussion of the death of SOA led Johan den Haan to post SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA [...]

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DIALOG Governance, Change Control and Rules

February 6, 2009

I took some notes from an interesting panel on governance and change control. Panels are always tough to blog so this is a summary of my takeaways not a record of the panel:

Executive sponsorship and active evangelism are key
Build expertise – centers of excellence – within the groups that are managing rules
Start early and iterate [...]

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Building Blocks of Decision Management

October 30, 2008

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

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Introducing SOA Design Patterns

October 7, 2008

Thomas was back on talking about the catalog of 85 SOA Design Patterns that he is publishing this year – SOA Design Patterns. Design patterns are a field-testing or proven design solution to a common design problem. Some are compound, most are atomic. These SOA Patterns overcome common design challenges for the successful adoption of [...]

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From Scores to Strategies

September 23, 2008

The use of analytics in business decisions, presented by one of InfoCentricity’s customers, was next. In many organizations modelers are busy building predictive models that they then throw over the wall to a business analyst. To bridge this gap you need a collaboration platform that allows modelers to do their thing while allowing business analysts [...]

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What if someone with a lower pay grade were to do this?

September 11, 2008

Patrick Joseph Gauthier wrote a great post this week called “Business Process Reengineering: The Right Skills And Roles For The Task Will Save You  Money” and I loved the question he suggests (that gave me the title for this post):
“what if someone with a lower pay grade were to do this?”
He goes on to make [...]

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Warranty decisions are one reason iRobot’s outsourced call center doesn’t work as well as it should

August 13, 2008

I have been an iRobot customer since Christmas. Much as I like their products, their customer service decision making leaves a lot to be desired. This particular post was prompted by their inconsistent warranty decision management. iRobot has outsourced its call center, as many companies have, and sound like they want to deliver excellent customer [...]

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