Today’s leading P&C carriers deal with huge numbers of policies, online transactions and batch transactions and the volume is always growing. That means a legacy policy administration system that works today might not be adequate tomorrow. High-performance, scalable policy admin solutions are no longer “nice to have.” They’re absolutely essential for every P&C carrier, everywhere.
In a 2013 benchmarking study conducted by Adaptik, Oracle and CGI, PolicyWriter easily exceeded the theoretical transaction volume and scalability requirements of even the largest insurers.
To ensure seamless handling of both online and batch requests, policy administration systems deployed by large personal line carriers must be able to:
Support thousands of active users
Maintain approximately 30 million in-force policies
Process 175 million online transactions per year, including 200,000 per hour during peak load periods
Process 35 million batch transactions per year, including 150,000 renewals per hour during peak load periods
Scale to take full advantage of available hardware
Even under optimal conditions, many P&C policy administration solutions cannot meet those metrics or barely do. In a 2013 benchmarking study conducted by Adaptik, Oracle and CGI, however, PolicyWriter easily exceeded the theoretical transaction volume and scalability requirements of even the largest insurers.
Tests conducted on PolicyWriter measured the system’s end-user response time, scalability and throughput under various load levels, starting with 40 million pre-populated policies. Online policy processing was simulated by four business transactions: A new personal auto policy with two operators and two vehicles was created and issued; it was then changed by adding an operator and a vehicle. After that, the policy was cancelled and then reinstated. Batch policy processing was simulated by selecting business policies for renewal, and then creating and issuing renewal transactions.
Results of the tests executed against a database deployed on an ExaData X3-2 Oracle Database Server, with requests delivered by Apache’s JMeter v2.9 r1437961 testing tool and batch processing provided by IBM WebSphere MQ Server 6.0.2.5 were as follows:
PolicyWriter proved capable of processing more than 1 million online transactions and 1.85 million batch renewals per hour while serving more than 10,000 concurrent users. This exceeds transactional volumes needed by the largest carriers by factors of 5 (online) and 12 (batch).
Transaction throughput doubled each time hardware capacity doubled representing near-perfect scalability.
The average response time of requests from a browser to the application server was below 0.6 seconds, with sub-3 second response times 98 percent of the time.
This test proved that PolicyWriter is more than capable of serving the needs of even the largest P&C carriers today and tomorrow. Simply put, the software is as capable as the hardware it runs on. Need to accommodate additional policy or transaction volume? Simply purchase more (or upgraded) server racks you’ll never need to worry about whether PolicyWriter can handle the load.
About the author
Faruk Batakci is Vice President of Performance Engineering & DBA at Adaptik Corporation. Adaptik, the creator of PolicyWriter, develops highly flexible and modern policy administration software solutions that are designed to improve speed-to-market, drive operational agility and scale to support large numbers of users and high transaction volumes.
