Horizon Casualty Services Selects RulesPower

Seeking to eventually automate all of its business processes under a single master business management model, Horizon Casualty Services (Newark, N.J.) has selected RulesPower (Burlington, Mass.) for claims management and adjudication process automation.

Horizon Casualty Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Horizon Healthcare Services Inc. (Newark, N.J.), chose RulesPower because it is the only solution on the market that combines business process analysis (BPA), business rules engine (BRE) and business process management (BPM) functionality, according to John Oliveira, Horizon Casualty's director of operations and marketing. "From both a functionality and total cost perspective, we believe it is very competitive with all the products that are out there," he comments.

The solution is well tailored to the company's strategic vision "to reduce the cost of business processes, improve the quality of results and increase the capacity to handle business transactions," Oliveira says. "The RulesPower development program that we are beginning will enable us to meet all three goals."

RulesPower will allow Horizon Casualty to transcend its current development approach, which entails "morph[ing] existing code with rules embedded in the code," and deliver significant service benefits to Horizon's customers, Oliveira asserts. "The indirect benefits will be through improved business processes, while the direct ones will be through applications that enable our operations people to better respond to customers," he says.

While declining to comment on the value off the contract, Oliveira says that Horizon Casualty Services expects to begin reaping the benefits of its investment within the first year of the implementation, which is scheduled to begin this month. "Our goal was to improve quality, reduce cost and increase capacity; we believe that we will be achieving these goals in a relatively short time," he says.

Horizon Casualty Services plans to use the RulesPower technology across its entire operation. "Initially, we'll be beginning in one selected area, but as we implement and are able to move on, we plan on moving to all the different business processes in our company," Oliveira explains.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio