How Nationwide Insurance use IBM Decision Manager and BPM

Nationwide’s Smarter Process Journey with IBM Operational Decision Management and BPM

Jamie Hardy

Nationwide Director, IT Applications

Renee Gallion

Nationwide Manager, IT App Development

IBM InterConnect 2015

Agenda

•Nationwide Overview •Nationwide Life before ODM

A look at Nationwide’s challenges prior to implementing ODM

•Nationwide Life with ODM The advantages gained through implementing ODM Fun facts around ODM processing Current and Future Accomplishments

•Nationwide Finance before BPM

•Nationwide Finance with BPM The advantages gained through implementing BPM Lessons Learned Key accomplishments

•Nationwide ODM with BPM Automation of some tasks

•Fun facts around BPM

•Current and Future BPM Accomplishments


Nationwide Overview

Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world, focusing on domestic property and casualty insurance, life insurance and retirement savings, asset management and strategic investments The last 80 years Nationwide® has gone from a small auto insurer for Ohio farmers, to one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world with more than $183 billion in statutory assets


Nationwide Life before ODM

Technical Challenges

• Rules implemented in multiple systems

• Rules implemented in various technologies

• Different release cycles across the Enterprise


Finance IT contained volatile business rules spread across these technologies: Informatica, PeopleSoft, Teradata, Hyperion, Oracle, Shell Scripting, PERL

Nationwide Life before ODM

Business Challenges

• Rules were not shareable across technologies

• Lack of single set of standards for rules

• Inconsistent business processes for rule changes

• Heavy dependence on IT in business process

• Required system analysts to determine changes

• Application developers to affect changes


Implementing a Solution

Business Standards

• Enterprise wide data dimensionality requirements

• Centralized policy & standards ownership

• Regular meetings with Business Partners to identify and understand upcoming changes

IT Standards

• Centralized tool for managing business rules

• Uniform naming to allow rules to be shared

• Governance for rule changes


Partnership between Business & IT


Projects at Nationwide

Global-

Rules

Segment-

Global-

Rules

Segment-

NF-Rules

Segment-

PCIO-Rules

…

Segment-

OOI-Rules

…

Mapping-

Outbound-

Rules

Critical-

Global-

Rules

Pre-Critical-

Rules

Post-

Critical-

Rules

Standardized Vocabulary

• Naming standards allowed for rule sharing across different data layouts

• Custom tool would evaluate all layouts and place fields that are the same name and type higher up in the class hierarchy


Standardized Ruleflow


• No rule flow maintenance

• Easily understood

Standardized – Rule Packages


• Top level rule packages correlate to rule flow tasks

• Where to place rules in a rule package is intuitive… Knowing where it will execute is not buried in a rule flow

Concept of Operation

Information Modeling

Application Architecture

Rule Organization

Rule Model

IT Cycle Business Cycle

Rule Designer

Decision Center

Rule Authoring is essentially a Business Activity

Rule Analysis

Rule Authoring

Governance Testing

Deployment

Roles at Nationwide Business Data Steward

‒Responsible for source system output data

Configuration Manager ‒Responsible for ruleapp deployment and baselines

management

Rule Author ‒Responsible for analyzing rules for extraction from on

boarding systems and authoring of business rules

IT ‒Responsible for BOM/XOM development and any helper

logic that may be needed within ODM


Rule Authoring at Nationwide

Change Management Process & Governance

13

Key Accomplishments

•Centralized business rule management

•Over 400 interfaces integrated into our Financial Integration Layer (FIL) Application Suite

•SLA monitoring tool

•Future capacity

•Repeatable process

•Improved IT & Business capabilities

Rule criticality

Rule analysis in the hand of the business versus IT

Separation of concerns

Alignment of duties

•10-day close


Finance & the Close Process - Success


0

5

10

15

20

25

30

2006 2007

2008 2009

2010

28

18

16

12

10

2

12 14

18

20

Days to Close

Analysis

• Dramatic reduction in processing time allows business to provide earlier analytics, which provides greater flexibility

• Less complexity reduces audit time, saving money

• Knowing where we are financially & technically throughout the process

• Nationwide Finance IT processes around 3445 source system files thru ODM each month

Files with a few records to 30+ million

Up to 680 million records per month and growing

Up to 30,032 recs/sec – depends on ratio, size of records, # fields

• Over 426 interfaces and counting (229 layouts)

200,000+ Rules, 225 Rulesets

51 rule projects

• 45-50 Change Requests / 500 to 1500 rule changes per month


Fun Facts about our Processing

Most Recent Key Accomplishments

•Shared Data Usage

Sources sending duplicate data to multiple applications

Introduced risk without ability to ensure same data was being consumed

Ability to reuse the rules

•Shared infrastructure for separate instances of ODM

Saves the company money

•ODM chosen as the Enterprise Standard Solution

Established framework and best practices for BMRS

Shared Application Area is standing up an instance for other LOBs to utilize

•ODM Upgrade to 8.5.1


Future Accomplishments

•Expose rule service so other areas can setup process to run against rules

•Upgrade 8.6

•Continuous Improvement

Ongoing review of how we can further leverage the product to standardize processes within the department


Nationwide Finance before BPM

•Requests to change Financial Reference Data were manual Business Rules

Allocation Rules

Reference Data

Other back office data

•Manual “work flow”

•Many versions of the change form

•Hand off were e-mails, phone calls, IM’s, drive by’s, etc

•Changes were manually implemented

•Changes were manually tracked in a Database

•Tools and methods to validate data were outside the system of record

•Multiple resources to complete the above tasks


BPM Project

•Utilized the Quick win pilot

•Decided on an Agile approach

Issues resolved timely by team

Communication with daily scrum

Business users were present for review, feedback, and validation

Collaborative work space was beneficial

•Nationwide Developers were trained in BPM before the project and then were dedicated 100% during the project.

•Configuration expertise was readily available from our centralized BPM infrastructure team

•Frequent playbacks were held to demonstrate functionality


Lessons learned

•Making BPM successful at a large company Required an organizational shift/change in culture; agile project team in an environment geared toward waterfall

Having to coordinate and get buy in across the organization (Security, Infrastructure, SQA, and business partner)

•Shared resources across connecting projects

•Business needs to be allocated 100% to the project much like the developers

•Have everyone on the team trained in Agile prior to the project including the management team and project sponsors

•Put substantial thought into naming the application- something catchy to help drive change

•Uplift process before automation


Nationwide Finance after BPM adoption

•Fully integrated streamlined workflow

•Drastically reduced cycle time for a change

•Reduction of manual work

•Functionality placed in the hands of end users

•Elimination of Data Errors

•Process visibility

•Streamlined Reporting

•Nationwide BPM application expertise

•Continually evolving

Touch points held with the business for feedback


BPM Key Accomplishments

•First Implementation of BPM at Nationwide

•Standardized Project life cycle BPM developer expertise

Ease of use to set up new projects

•Upgraded to 8.0 Converted from heritage coaches to next generation coaches

Utilized new coach validation frame work

•Created more sophisticated error handling

•Ability to use API calls for external systems of record

•All financial reference data is managed in one application

•Integrated BPM with ODM business process

•BPM chosen as the Enterprise Standard Solution Established framework and best practices


Nationwide utilizing ODM with BPM

•Beginning process was built for some business tasks

•Swivel chair process

•Multiple Databases used to track tasks

•Process did not include other area’s tasks

Development, testing, and other key area’s

•No constant flow for process

•Business was trying to create their own process with spreadsheets to track tasks.

•Business resistant to change


Challenges:

Nationwide ODM with BPM

•One single process that encompasses all impacted resources

•Some things still swivel chair but automated some processes

Communication (important documents, test results, outage notices)

Notification for migration

•Retired access Db’s along with manual spreadsheet tracking of tasks

•Developed an IT Process that is driven by the data generated from the business process

•Built in approval processes for audits

•Utilized out of the box key dashboard reports


Accomplishments:

Fun Facts on BPM

•Reduction of cycle time for a request

•8,935 request received since inception (multiple tasks)

22,669 request items/tasks completed

30 monthly cycles (8/2012)

756 request items/tasks completed per month

•Business given longer to submit the change before cut off

Disbursement Code went from the 17th of the month to BD-6 (around the 23rd of the month)


BPM Future Accomplishments

•Continuous Improvement

Ongoing review of how we can further leverage the product to standardize processes within the department

•Automate current swivel chair processes

•How can we do things better on past projects

Automate more with ODM

Change to transaction based rather than incremental

When to reuse or break away

•Upgrade to 8.5.5


Questions ?


How Nationwide Insurance use IBM Decision Manager and BPM

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