OIPA Key Concepts

Activity Processing

Activity processing is a fundamental part of the Oracle Insurance Policy Administration system. Almost every event that occurs in the insurance domain can be modeled as an activity in the system. An activity records all the changes it makes and provides the ability to undo any such changes. Activities are therefore fundamental to corrective processing in OIPA. Activities are transactional units of work, so they never leave a business entity in an invalid state.

The behavior of activities from capturing the input data to the resulting changes is configured in XML using the Rules Palette. The configured XML is called a transaction. An activity is an instance of a transaction.

Some typical OIPA transactions at the policy level are premium, billing and anniversary processing. Quite often as in policy administration, one event on a policy triggers another, such as a notification letter or recalculation. OIPA supports this by providing the ability to one or more activities as a result of processing an activity.

The above diagram illustrates the activity processing at a high level. The transaction XML configures input fields for the activities, the math to transform data, a set of rules to persist the changes, new activities that could be spawned, and so on.

An activity may be created by a user from the user interface, by another activity or as a result of incoming data from a web service. An activity is processed by the Shared Rules Engine, which is a component responsible for executing OIPA transactions and business rules. The results of activity processing are then stored in the database.