Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Picking an EDM pilot

When I was reading Scott Ambler's book, The Enterprise Unified Process, he had some great tips for picking a pilot project that I thought I would shamelessly steal and adapt for a discussion of pilot projects for enterprise decision management...

Live from InterACT: Rules-Based Product and Pricing Engine (Everbank)

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Rules-Based Product and Pricing Engine (Everbank)" presented by EverBank and their implementation partner ValueMomentum. The project was consolidation of...

Live from InterACT: Customer Centricity in Action: Best Buy

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Customer Centricity in Action: Best Buy" being presented by Fair Isaac and Best Buy jointly. Customer centricity has some...

Live from InterACT: Continuous Pricing. A Case Study in Captive Optimization

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Continuous Pricing. A Case Study in Captive Optimization" from Dell Financial Services. DFS is (or soon will be) a...

Live from InterACT: Agility Pays Off: A Case Study(Avnet)

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Agility Pays Off: A Case Study (Avnet)" and Jim Joy of Avnet ran through how and why they developed...

Congratulations to EDM-Driven MyCokeRewards

(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Six Cans A Day Man, Ian Turvill.) Congratulations to Coca-Cola's myCokeRewards.com which was given the PROMO's 2007 Interactive Marketing Award for "Best Loyalty Marketing". MyCokeRewards.com has been described on this blog before, though at the...

Interesting use for predictive analytics in insurance

I heard about a fascinating use of predictive analytics recently. The company concerned is DriveCam, who focus on improving risky driving behavior by predicting and preventing crashes. They provide an exception-based video event recorder that captures sights and sounds inside...

Beat Google at Its Own Game: Apply Predictive Analytics for Keyword Bidding

Marketers using keyword bidding can dramatically increase the ROI of their marketing programs through EDM.

Does Fox TV need a rules engine?

I was at the gym the other day (no, really) and watching TV. I'm not a TV watcher at home so the gym is the rare time I actually see any TV. As Fox Sports went to an ad break...

Here's how one company is using business rules to manage advertising pricing

One of the challenges for a newspaper, magazine or TV channel is how to generate precise ad prices quickly in high volume and extremely complex situations. In many of these situations the volume and contractual complexity makes it hard, if...

Enterprise Decision Management by any other name would smell as sweet

I was reading Guy Kawasaki's blog and saw this article on a new company called cFares. Now cFares is a new kind of discount travel company. Two of the distinctive characteristics that Guy describes strike me as the kinds of...

Rules Management Solution Powers Customer Incentive Program

A case study as published in Enterprise Systems Journal about Avnet - Rules Management Solution Powers Customer Incentive Program. This case study covers how a Blaze Advisor customer built a rebate management system. A great story of a project paying...

A case study - rules in manufacturing

I was reading about a client of ours, Air Products, last week and I thought they made an interesting case study. I also reviewed a presentation they made at the Americas SAP User Group. Air Products is a $8bn global...

Eligibility management - a perfect opportunity for business rules

One of the most common uses of decisioning technology in Government is the management of eligibility. As you will see this is mostly a rules and compliance issue, though there may be a role for analytics in deriving some of...

Healthcare and credit-based decisioning

Saw this interesting little piece in Health Data Management today - Hospitals Should Know the Score. An interesting snippet on how important proper credit management is for hosptials - "As much as 30% of patient payments end up being written...

Making New Friends, A Million Consumers at a Time

My colleague at Fair Isaac, Jeff Zabin - noted marketing author and bon vivant - has been publishing a quarterly newsletter for Fair Isaac's Precision Marketing Group. Aptly it is called Marketing Decisions, since it focuses on the application of...

Take a Gamble with EDM

James Taylor – great fount of EDM truisms, from whom all rules- and analytics-based wisdom flows – likes to ask a question. It sounds like it should set up the punchline to a joke, but unfortunately it doesn’t. “How do...

AIG Trade Credit - a case study

Digging around in some old case studies and I found this one from AIG Trade Credit. This one was an interesting one for a couple of reasons. Firstly its a great example of how business rules can help IT and...

Property and Casualty Agent Portals

IBM has built an interesting solution prototype on this topic - http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/financialservices/doc/content/landingdtw/1479639103.html. Blaze Advisor is the rules engine behind this and any kind of automated underwriting like this is going to involve predictive risk models as well as interactive dialogs....

Managing complex repairs and diagnostics

Although the manufacturing and repair business is not one often associated with business rules, nevertheless there are some interesting uses of business rules to be found. Two are outlined below. First Seagate Disk drive manufacturing may produce more than 50,000...

BASEL II Compliance

Basel II is a worldwide banking accord with the stated goal of improving global financial stability though adjustment of loan reserves to match risk. The final version of the Accord was published June 2004 and has an all-encompassing impact on...

UK Bank and operational credit risk

Back in 2002 a major UK online bank set out to implement a new credit management system. This was intended to: Improve the operational management of credit risk Reduce the effort expended in manual interventions Reduce disparate IT systems into...

Customer Segmentation to increase profits

Customer segmentation is often the first kind of analytics attempted by a company. It is not, however, only for "newbies" - even the most sophisticated companies can use better segmentation to drive better results. Take Barclaycard, one of Europe's largest...

Real-time, risk-based underwriting

When Unitrin's Kemper Auto and Home Group rolled out real-time, risk-based underwriting the benefits included improved financial performance, consistent decisions across channels and greater operational efficiency. Kemper found that automating this decision worked smoothly “behind the scenes” to enable consistent,...

Autonomic Telecommunications Networks

This "case study" is an amalgam of a number of Blaze Advisor business rules customers. Each of these is in production and together show the potential for business rules in particular to change the way telecommunications company's deliver services by...

Seagate and disk drive diagnostics

Disk drive manufacturing may produce more than 50,000 drives per day at a single plant. Discs that fail their quality assurance check must have a determination of the fault and the proper repair strategy. Blaze Advisor is used to drive...

Sun using business rules to improve availability

Process automation for patch release management requires decisioning intelligence - what patches apply to a customer's specific software or hardware. Symptoms, issues, diagnostics and configuration management are required to put software and hardware together based on maintenance releases, compatibilities…etc. In...

Preventing Identity Theft

Identity theft is a hot topic these days. There is a lot of talk about steps you can take to help prevent it - myFICO has a great set of suggestions for instance - and one can also be very...

What types of decisions in the mortgage industry can use EDM?

There are many mortgage decisions that can use business rules or business rules and analytics in combination. Here are some examples. Underwriting Business rules have been used to implement underwriting for sub-prime products - often in conjunction with analytics. For...

Insurance Underwriting - pushing decisions to the point of contact

Auto Club Group, a AAA insurer, has used business rules to automate underwriting decisions - a classic business rules scenario. LIke many insurers they were manually reviewing 100% of their policy requests.As they expanded into new markets they needed to...

License Fee Calculations

The California DMV recently replaced the portion of a legacy system that dealt with license fee calculation with a business rules implementation. This was the one part of the old legacy system that had variable business rules - it required...