The Product Machine is a comprehensive set of tools that empower your business professionals to build, design, and publish products.

Business users minimize the dependency on IT by:

• defining and maintaining product information
• creating business rules
• maintaining calculation algorithms

The business and marketing group can

• respond to market conditions faster
• implement rate and product changes easier than ever before

The following figure illustrates the overall approach and the various components:

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Figure 1: Product Machine Architecture

The cornerstone of the Product Machine is the Product Definition System (PDFS). It allows your subject matter experts (such as actuaries, marketing, and legal) to easily create, modify and test your company’s product portfolio, business, and rating rules. The multi-user application follows a strict workflow defining how product changes can be introduced in a collaborative manner. The componentized product model promotes the idea of reusability so that product components (e.g. riders and options) can be reused among different products.

The Product Services are part of the Product Machine and provide the operational processing. Product Information, Rules Processing, and Calculation services are available by means of the open, xml-based API. The API can be integrated and accessed from any application including:

• policy administration
• automated underwriting
• agency management
• quoting
• rating (including Web-based).

Product Services are available on a variety of platforms including Windows^®, UNIX, and host-based systems.

When calling the API, the product services are driven by the information as the business users have entered them into the Product Definition System.

The Generators are used to promote product changes and alterations into the operational environment. The Business Expert can control at various levels what components to promote.

• a single row,
• a table or
• an entire product

for a given state. The generators produce database tables, Java source code, XML and configuration files. The generator and compiler approach ensures the best possible performance while executing within the operational environment.

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