Reference Insurance Model

Insurance organizations have long been in need of an enterprise wide data model, not only to provide business users with a consistent unified view of customers, contracts and other data across multiple systems, but also to aid in implementing end to end business processes, to enhance the quality of data, to promote business agility and to ensure effective service reuse.

Prima IBCS™ is that object-oriented insurance model suite: it covers the major functional domains of all the principal branches of insurance (life, non-life, personal-commercial lines and reinsurance), it is used by dozens of clients as the foundation for projects spanning from underwriting to contract and claim management systems, and it has been adopted by ACORD as the foundation of the ACORD Information Model.

Prima IBCS™ is based on best of breed technology and market standards, it comes delivered not only with a template driven code generation toolset, but also includes a productivity suite featuring a mapping tool for deriving models, a validation tool, graphical search and navigation tools, and an import and export toolset.

What is Prima IBCS?

Prima IBCS is a comprehensive offering made of:

• A Reference data model expressed in UML providing the definition of key insurance concepts. The model has been designed to be easily adapted and extended, leveraging best of breed design patterns, providing online documentation and following industry standards (ACORD chose Prima IBCS™ as the foundation for the ACORD Information Model).
• A Productivity Suite to easily create project models out of the Reference model and to guarantee the traceability between models and to preserve the integrity and consistency of the models through iteration cycles.
• A Code Generation Suite to automate the creation of technical assets for project implementation.

Reference Model

Prima IBCS covers the major insurance functional domains: sales, administration and claims management for Property, Casualty, Life along with Annuities, Health, Reinsurance and Large Commercial lines of business.

Prima IBCS™ is organized in 2 models:

• Business Concepts Model: 12 business concept related domains (class diagrams). Each domain contains documented classes and service definitions.
  
  
• Business Processes Model: 8 business process related domains (activity diagrams). Each domain contains documented business processes, classes and service definitions.
  

The insurance model's coverage and standard content is proven by ACORD's decision to choose Prima IBCS™ as the foundation of its Information Model.

Application Modeling

When an application is developed, one of the crucial tasks is to define and design the data that the application will handle and store. Prima IBCS provides a reliable, standard and proven Reference Model to easily define the models of the application. In the context of an application, Prima IBCS is used to define:

• the conceptual object model within the application
• The implementation object model
• The physical data model
• Possibly any additional technical model (message model …)

Enterprise Data Modeling

To ensure a consistent and standard way of defining, understanding, exchanging and integrating data between different systems and applications at the enterprise level, Prima IBCS provides an Enterprise Data model independent of any physical implementation. Prima IBCS ensures that a common data dictionary is used between departments to define the business meaning of each information element and how physical systems manipulate the data. In this context, the Enterprise Data Model is used to define:

• A common data dictionary to be shared by functional teams across departments
• Messages exchanged between applications and potentially handled by integration tools
• Data models for newly developed applications

Key Benefits

• Reduce the gap between business and technical users. Provide an enterprise-wide semantic that improves mutual understanding and knowledge sharing. Maintain consistency and synchronization between the documented rich UML model and the resulting implementations and tool integrations.
• Enhance the quality of data. Map all existing information to one comprehensive model, thus facilitating the setup of an enterprise data model. Promote data governance, data warehousing and
  unifi ed reporting across business lines.
• Improve quality and productivity of IT. Speed up the design and development of large object models by adaptation from the well-documented supplied comprehensive model. The incremental approach reduces the costs and risks associated with the deployment of a Service Oriented Architecture and promotes the reusability of services.
• Enable collaborative end to end processes across departments and systems. Enable consistent and homogeneous views of data across legacy applications that facilitate business monitoring and compliance.
• Add an abstraction layer between the front-end applications and the legacy based environments. Enable the decoupling and direct dependencies between the data manipulated in the front tier and the middle tier with the proprietary data structures from the data stores; this isolation allows the addition of new systems to the enterprise infrastructure and the migration of legacy systems.