Ravi Kumar Blog Posts

A web server serves pages for viewing in a Web browser, while an application server provides methods that client applications can call. A little more precisely, we say that: A web server exclusively handles HTTP requests, whereas an application server serves business logic to application programs through any number of protocols. Let us discuss on each in more detail The Web server A Web server handles the HTTP protocol. When the Web server receives an HTTP request, it responds with an HTTP response, such as sending back an HTML page. To process a request, a Web server may respond with a static HTML page or image, send a redirect, or delegate the dynamic response generation to some other program such as CGI scripts, JSPs (JavaServer Pages), servlets, ASPs (Active Server Pages), server-side JavaScripts, or some other server-side technology. Whatever their purpose, such server-side programs generate a response, most often in HTML, for viewing in a Web browser. Understand that a Web se...

A policy may be cancelled manually or automatically. Manual cancellations (notices or terminations) accept some basic input about the transactions. Automatic cancellations can be performed for non-payment or underwriting edit check failure. The cash balance on every policy is checked periodically (prior to the next billing cycle) to assess sufficiency to cover the next approaching billing period. If the balance falls short of the required amount, a cancellation notice is send to the insured and changes the status of the policy. Underwriting cancellations are automatically carried out when the rating process recognizes that underwriting checks have failed. A policy’s status may change to ‘Under Notice of Cancellation’ or ‘Terminated’. Although both of them are generally discussed under the umbrella of cancellations, they are very different from an insurer viewpoint. When a policy is under notice, it is still in force and coverage has to be provided to the insured. However, once it is te...

Quotation Process Quote generation is a process by which the prospective insurer is given a tentative premium amount depending on the information provided by him/her. Quote only requires certain minimum information which is specific to line of business. This is sufficient data to rate the quote and provide a premium. If the insured chooses to accept the quote, the data from the quote is transferred to an application, thus eliminating duplication of data entry effort. A quote can be rated multiple times to arrive at the new premium based on a change. When a quote is converted to an application, it asks for any information not available in the quote but required for the application, before it can be converted. Some of the larger agents who do a lot of business with a carrier send the application data in electronic form, instead of faxing (or otherwise sending the physical application form) and manual data entry, thus minimizing chances of errors. The application data entry process assig...

Insurance is the facility of purchasing protection for one’s property from a potential hazard or liability against third party claims . It is typically purchased from a financial institution such as an insurance carrier for a certain price. This price is called a premium . The hazard can be either complete loss or partial damage. The reason something is insured is that in the event of loss or damage to that property, the owner may not possess sufficient resources to bear the (financial) loss. Instead, the loss is transferred to the insurance company with greater financial strength. To the insurance company, the insured entity is a risk . It assumes the financial responsibility of reimbursing the insured for any losses incurred by usage of that entity. In the event no losses are incurred by the insured, the full premium paid by the insured is retained by the insurer and contributes to its profits. Whenever there is a loss incurred by the insured, he/she files a claim. After investigati...

The insurance market in United States of America is broadly segmented into: Life and Asset Management, Property and Casualty (P&C), Reinsurance, and Brokerage. For example, Commercial property insurance can pertain to medical malpractice and commercial automobiles such as buses, trucks, taxis, etc., while Personal property insurance can pertain to personal automobiles and homes. Life and Asset Management The life and asset management insurance market is composed of the following insurance products: * Life insurance, which provides for payment of a specified amount on the insured's death, either to a designated beneficiary or, in the case of an endowment policy, to the policy holder at a specified date * Annuity products, which provide an income for a specified period of time, such as a number of years or for life Life and asset management products are sold to both individuals and to groups. Typical products are as follows: * Individual policies, including term life, universal l...

Overview Pega defines Direct Capture Of Objectives as “ a set of Application rules and wizards designed to capture and tie the business objectives, project goals, requirements and use cases to actual implementation ”. DCO currently comes packaged with all version of PRPC 5.3 SP1 and onwards. But DCO SP2 which is its latest version is supported only by PRPC 5.4 . The rules for this utility is part of the Pega-AppDefinition Ruleset which is packaged as PegaRULES_DirectCapture Application . Pega sees DCO to be a way of maintaining Requirment Tracebility and reduce costs due to rework and fixing bugs created during the course of fixing some bugs. It ensures accountability because it can check if all the requirements/use cases has been met/addressed. Key Components of DCO: (1) Application Profile : Application profile is an Auto-Generated word document designed to help the information gathering phase of the a project life’s cycle. The document is created as part of an automated tool cal...

A testing where the tester tries to break the software by randomly trying functionality of software. Testing that determines if software will be usable by people with disabilities. The following characteristics determines the testable software. a. observability b. simplicity c. stability Types of Testing Scenarios: Alpha Testing is conducted at the developer sites and in a controlled environment by the end user of the software Beta Testing is testing the application after the installation at the client place. Black-box testing attempts to find errors in 1. incorrect or missing functions 2. interface errors 3. performance errors The testing technique that requires devising test cases to demonstrate that each program function is operational is called Black Box Testing Component Testing is testing of individual software components (Unit Testing). Compatibility testing is to test whether software is compatible with other elements of system. Concurrency Testing: Multi-user testing geared t...

Pegasystems Provides a Foundation of Insurance-Specific Best Practices to Help Insurers Quickly Realize ROI and Maximize Reuse of Assets across the Enterprise. Work Templates The Insurance Industry Framework provides high-level work templates that serve as best-practice implementations of Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite, leveraging the strengths of the underlying platform to best advantage and maximum reusability. These workflow templates serve as starting points to build out SmartBPM applications and services to manage your specific business needs. Pegasystems’ template workflows coupled with an insurance object model based on IAA standards enable fast time to market with a wide range of processes, from new business to claims across multiple lines of business. Customized Rule Forms Customized rule forms enable users to easily define product groups, products, components, and features. These rule forms allow users to associate products with product groups and define which components, sub-com...

Insurance client to meet the increasing the market challenges and fast growing business need embarked on a business IT initiative to automate the business process for quick turn around and higher process efficiency. Client also faced challenges in maintaining and updating the underwriting and rating rules embedded in their legacy system. Following are the challenges face by the customer in the existing business / IT environment. Business Challenges: 1.Manual capture of policy related information. 2.Rating is done manually by using the spreadsheets, where the business logic and premium generation logic are embedded. 3.Tightly couple legacy system with business rules, underwriting rules and rating rule embedded in legacy system makes incorporation of dynamic business needs a time consuming process. 4.Tracking and follow up on pending quote awaiting underwriters action was difficult due to non availability of aging reports on policy quotes and issuance. Pega Solution: Pega solution is ai...

What is SMS? The Short Message Service (SMS) facility offered by telephone carriers was originally designed for pagers (beepers), well before the invention of the Internet, Instant Messaging, or e-mail messaging. To a phone user, SMS is similar to but slower than text messaging, a more recently introduced phone service. In the United States, all major mobile phone carriers offer an automatic service that converts an e-mail message to an SMS message. The carrier then routes the SMS messages to any cell phone or beeper that supports SMS. (Of course, many carriers and many mobile devices now provide much more capable instant message and e-mail support, but SMS is most widely available.) Three constraints apply to e-mail messages to be converted to SMS format: The message text is limited to 160 characters, counting the To: address The message must contain only plain text (no HTML markup, no images, no attachments) The email address must identify the carrier Sending an SMS from Pega applica...

Some of the below performance improvements w.r.t any Pega application are to be taken care during implementation. Technical: Use Page-Remove method when a Page-New used in the activity Don’t try to pull BLOBs when you are using Obj-List Exposing of a column is must when you want to pull the data from DB Indexing is required Set the DB Connection pool Reducing the size of JavaScript files Tune the JVM settings properly Check the error handling techniques used Identify the long run SQL Queries Archive and Purging of Work Objects Non-Technical: Perform the preflight check before you lock a RuleSet version Check infrastructure before deploy the application

These important tools those are available in the system to track different aspects of erformance: PAL: PAL stands for Performance AnaLyzer, and is a collection of counters and timer readings that an application developer uses to analyze some performance issues in a system. Process Commander captures the nformation necessary to identify processing inefficiencies or excessive use of resources in your application and stores this data in “PAL counters” or “PAL readings” for one requestor or node. PAL is a tool which should be used to gain insight into where the system is spending resources; poor performance, such as delays in processing, refreshing screens, submitting work objects, or other application functions, will be highlighted. Use PAL to determine whether there are resource issues impacting performance, or whether issues may arise when more load is added to the system. PAL readings are not meant to give developers a definitive answer about performance problems. Depending upon how th...

Performance Problem Types When anyone complains that “performance is slow” in Pega, more details are required to pinpoint the problem to begin troubleshooting. There are several types of performance problems: *Function-specific *General system-wide *Time-specific *User-specific (one user or a group of users) *Agent-related *Service-related *Environment Function-Specific A function-specific problem occurs only when the user performs one specific function. For example, users may experience slow performance when opening a form for a customer call; but if they try some other process, such as creating a new account record, that process runs fine, with no perceived slowness. General System-Wide If the issue is not with one particular flow or user, but the system seems overall to be slow, there may be a system-wide performance problem. Time-Specific There may be a performance issue, but it only occurs at certain times of the day. Users may be able to work efficie...

The first step in any performance problem analysis or tuning project is to establish a context in which the performance of the system may be judged. In this Play, this concept will be called the performance context. A performance context is the means by which an observer or user of the system may judge whether performance is “good” or “bad,” by using some pre-established measure. Because words that a user will employ to describe performance (“good,” “bad,” “slow,” etc.) are relative terms, it is necessary to create a performance context to provide an objective and quantifiable means to measure the relative performance of the system. A performance context is data-based, and relies on at least one of the following measurements: SLA (Service Level Agreement) – performance target values for an application. A Service Level Agreement is a performance measurement which is defined by the business requirements of this application. Example SLAs might be: “The system must perform an account look...

In a Leading Insurance Provider there was no automation for the following business processes to generate the insurance policy for a customer. 1) Questionnaire Process : They did manually to get the questions and answers from the customer for his/her policy. 2) Premium Calculation Process : It had done manually by using the spreadsheets. In that spreadsheet they put the business logic and generate the premium. It was a time consuming process for each premium calculation. 3) Quote /Bind/ Book Process : Once the Premium got calculated then they were generating the Quote, Bind and Book documents manually. If any mistake in either of them then it was very painful for them to track it. A part from these it has the following common problems. 1) Underwriting Rules : As insurance depends on underwriting and the underwriters, there are certain rules which have to be followed while issuing the policy. The common problem for it is if any changes occur in those rules then it would be complex to res...

Business processing management or BPM is the orchestration of various business systems into identifiable and controllable systems. BPM can be used to solve a single glitch or inefficiency in the company, or it may be used to create a single unifying system to consolidate a myriad of different company processes. Business process management activities The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories: design, execution and monitoring. Process design: Process design encompasses the design and capture of existing business processes, as well as the simulation of new ones. The software used to do this includes graphical editors that document processes, repositories that store process models, and business process simulation tools to run a process a large number of times in order to measure performance parameters such as average time and cost. Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the system. Process execution: The comm...

Process Commander is the latest generation of Pegasystems’ industry leading, rules-based BPM systems. Delivering a unique blend of practice and process rules—what Pegasystems calls “Smart BPM”—Process Commander is built on a patented enterprise rules engine. This critical technological advantage enables large enterprises to efficiently develop, execute, manage, and evolve decision-intensive BPM applications. There are many categories and types of business rules on which organizations depend. The “smarts” in the smart BPM emanate directly from the system’s ability to capture and incorporate all the business rules that are needed to meet dynamic market demands. The entire Process Commander platform and processing facilities (the process steps, flow control logic, and participant selections) are all based on types of rules. In addition, other facilities such as monitoring and integration are also rules-based. Because organizations rely heavily on specific business policies and requirement...

Unlike other BPM products, PegaRULES Process Commander manages complex work using both practice rules (rules that automate work) and process rules (rules that route and assign work), in addition to system rules. With over 70 built-in specialized rules, Process Commander provides these three major categories of business rules to achieve multi-step parallel processing, automated decision making, and rich human and system interaction. • Practice Rules — Represent business guidelines or policies that define and drive a business. For example, “When shipping products to New York, apply New York state taxes,” or “When a purchase order for a personal computer exceeds $2,000, it must be approved by Finance,” or “When a preferred customer registers a product complaint, always offer that customer a rebate on future purchases.” Practice rules are created by both business and IT staff, but are managed primarily by business staff. • Process Rules — Define the procedural steps or flow regarding how...

Bring the Power of Rules to Enterprise Systems Using a Variety of Deployment Styles a. User Interface Integration: PegaRULES can be accessed directly from HTML, Java Server Pages, and Portlets b. Service Oriented Architecture: PegaRULES can be included with other systems in enterprise via popular protocols such as Web Services, IBM WebSphere/MQSeries, Java Messaging Services, Sun Microsystems J2EE Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and COM objects c. Batch Processing: PegaRULES can process flat-text files in an offline mode to address batch requirements d. Embedded in a Java Application: PegaRULES provides direct application programming interfaces for Java applications, including the JSR-94 rules engine API and a PegaRULES-specific API Rules-Based Applications to Meet Regional Needs PegaRULES leverages its ability to dynamically select rules to drive the presentation of locale-dependent information, allowing individuals around the world to access and benefit from a common set of business rules...

Extensible, Object-Oriented Rulebase PegaRULES uses an object-oriented model for its rulebase, and powerful inheritance and hierarchical algorithms to apply the right business rule at the right time. This hierarchical rule structure delivers flexibility, personalization capabilities, rapid application configuration, modification, and deployment. For example, general quality rules, compliance rules, and services rules can be defined as valid for the corporation, while specialized versions of these rules can be made available for specific organization units and/or applications. Common Enterprise Rulebase, Distributed Rule Execution The PegaRULES enterprise rules engine runs as a series of loosely coupled “nodes” that bring the execution of rules in close proximity to the requesting user or system. Distributed nodes provide the option to share a common rulebase and behave as a single system, enabling the ability to provide “local” performance over distributed physical machines. The Right ...

Introduction The benefits of business process improvement vary, but a rough rule of thumb is that it will, at a minimum, double the gains of a project by streamlining outdated practices, enhancing efficiency, promoting compliance and standardization, and making an organization more agile. Business process improvement involves three key steps: 1. Measure what matters to most customers. 2. Monitor the performance of key business processes. 3. Assign accountability for process improvement. Comprehensive business process management systems help organizations model and define complete business processes, implement those processes integrated with existing systems, and provide business leaders with the ability to analyze, manage, and improve the execution of processes in real time. Examining Business Processes Waiting in line at a grocery store is a great example of the need for process improvement. In this case, the “process” is called checkout, and the purpose is to pay for and bag groceri...