Commission Systems

Our client is a leading U.S. based international insurance organization and one of the largest underwriters of commercial and industrial coverage in the United States.

The Business Problem:

The challenge for our client was to build a new commissions system that reflected the various commission and contingency payment requirements of diverse internal and external independent sales agent channels. The requirements included integrating to existing legacy billing systems to extract and validate premium and agent details, recycle problem transactions, and to process and apportion payments across a spectrum of payment plans for biweekly, monthly, quarterly and annual payments. Depending on channel, these calculations were to result in statements and checks to be produced, or automated feeds to ledger and payroll systems.

The Solution:

Having in-depth of experience of both the insurance industry and the commissions subject area, BSS facilitated the detailed requirements gathering for the project.

The client decided to use a third party package to implement the core commission calculation functionality, so BSS took on the role of Project Management, modeling, extending integrating and testing this package into the existing legacy environment.

A substantial portion of the effort involved was to use the tool to model the payment plans, hierarchies, allocations, roll-ups and other aspects of the commissions plans.

The final product involved a web-enabled transaction recycling mechanism using Java Servlets running on IIS for Regional Office Managers to deal with erroneous billing transactions, with a mainframe DB2 Cobol backend performing the validations. The commissions engine itself ran with Java wrapper, with Java loaders and FTP transfers between legacy mainframe platform and the engine running on a Solaris box. Reporting and agent statements were developed in Crystal reports and published via the third party package to the client's Intranet.

Once the requirements had been gathered, the solution was implemented in six months.

During this process, BSS has become an implementation partner for this third party software vendor, and is engaged in other implementations of the software across the country.

Business Software Solutions, 1601 Schlumberger Drive, Moorestown, NJ 08057. Tel: 856-866-5601; Fax: 856-866-5602.