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 – Warranty and Repair Management – supports standard and extended warranties, extended service contracts and various after sale service functions. It is integrated with ERP systems and has a web-based front end. They focus on providing modular solutions than can be deployed as individual components and integrated with existing systems.
The architecture includes both workflow and rules engines that are highly configurable. From a decisioning point of view the key area is in the automation of claims processing. Here business users have full control on the policy terms, claim processing rules, supplier contracts and terms and conditions for claims. Tavant implements rules-based processing using the open source JBoss Drools engine. They have a nice approach whereby the policy terms and conditions are stored as rules as part of the policy of record and then executed in the processing step. Data validation for claims is also handled by the rules engine to see if the claim complete or potentially valid. When processing, additional rules can be fired to identify genuine claims and fraud and pass fraudulent ones off for manual review. In addition, rules are used to handle recovery with the terms and conditions that are part of a supplier contract mapped to additional rules. Finally claims routing e.g. by product line is also rules-based.
Tavant offers a extensive data infrastructure but this is mostly aimed at reporting and dashboards today. They have begun using data mining techniques to look for rules and are expanding towards the use of analytics especially in fraud detection.
Don’t forget to say hi if you see me at the Warranty Chain Management conference and check out the white paper on Next Generation Warranty Systems at decisionmanagementsolutions.com/warranty.
