VP/MS

VP/MS (Visual Product Modeling System) is a family of software components developed by CSC that support product development and product lifecycle management.[1] Insurance companies (among other users in business and IT[2]) use VP/MS to manage the rules, clauses, formular and calculations associated with savings and both life and non-life insurance products. With VP/MS all calculations and queries for purposes such as quotes and administration are supported by a central repository of product definitions.[1][3]

VP/MS
Original author(s)CSC
Initial release1997
Licensecorporate and individually negotiated
Websitewww.csc.com

VP/MS supports processes like product definition and administration, product testing and documentation, design checks, visualization and cross-platform usage of products. In addition to hosting product definitions, VP/MS is a modeling language. It provides a graphical interface (GUI) for creating business rules as components and models.[2]

VP/MS is platform independent[4] – products can be ported to any administration or illustration system or deployed over the Internet[5] – and makes use of the Eclipse platform[6] for developing software.

Product server

VP/MS is a product server[7] – a software tool that hosts all knowledge on insurance and other products centrally and provides it to application systems in various deployment scenarios and across various platforms.

The outcome of a VP/MS-designed model is modular, portable calculation rules.[3][5] VP/MS rendered calculation rules are in turn incorporated with associated applications, such as VP/MS Designer or J-VP/MS, to create (respectively) GUIs or a calculations architecture compatible with existing software architecture.[5]

Systems used by insurance policy administrators, product brokers and web servers ultimately rely on libraries of VP/MS rendered architecture for the production of product illustrations and calculations.[1]

VP/MS users

Industries

VP/MS is industry-neutral[1] – it is a generic tool that is not designed to be used exclusively within a specific industry. VP/MS has been deployed within non-insurance applications as a general rules engine. However, since it was developed within an insurance context,[7] VP/MS is applied broadly and extensively in insurance.

Among users of VP/MS are life insurers and providers of pensions,[8] property and casualty insurers[9] and health insurers[10]

Other sectors where VP/MS’s underlying rules management capabilities are applied include banking, energy and utilities.

Design

VP/MS Workbench is the main environment for modeling in VP/MS.[5] As such, it is used extensively in the back office during the design or maintenance of product rules. Actuaries, financial modelers, business analysts, product specialists and programmers are among those using VP/MS during this phase.[1]

A number of supplementary components support this phase of the product lifecycle. Examples are VP/MS Documentation Suite, VP/MS Test Suite and VP/MS Checker. Product managers use VP/MS Model Manager for an overview, product release and versioning, team collaboration and access control.[3][5] VP/MS Runtime is then responsible for sharing a single instance of a product across various platforms.

Implementation

After the design phase, VP/MS hosted architecture is supplied to the organization via related applications. For example, IT specialists use VP/MS Designer and J-VP/MS to integrate model libraries with end-user applications. The product server is sold as part of other applications under different names.

Multi platform capabilities

J-VP/MS integrates VP/MS calculation rules into existing software architectures via standard interfaces and technologies such as Java EE, XML-based SOAP, WSDL and Struts.[5]

Summarized history of VP/MS

1995 – VP/MS was designed by a team of M+I Unternehmensberatung GmbH (an Austrian consulting company, founded by Gerhard Friedrich and partners) with Interunfall Versicherung AG, a subsidiary insurance company of Generali Austria as the first client. Software development was done by CAF GmbH (a German software development company). It is originally named Versicherungsprodukt-Modellierungssystem (which translates to "insurance product modeling system").

1996 - M+I and CAF start to sell VP/MS to insurance companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

1998 – Development of VP/MS Designer by CAF.

1999 - PMS Micado (the German subsidiary of the US based Policy Management Systems Corporation) takes over CAF and obtains a worldwide general license to develop and sell VP/MS from M+I and Generali.

2001 – CSC takes over ownership of Policy Management Systems Corporation and all subsidiaries. Introduction of J-VP/MS and integration of VP/MS into CSC offerings.

2003 – Development of Eclipse-based VP/MS Model Manager.

2005 – Development of Eclipse-based VP/MS Test Suite.

2006 – Development of Eclipse-based VP/MS Documentation Suite.

2008 – Development of Eclipse-based Workbench and VP/MS Checker.

2017 - CSC is now a part of DXC Technology

In 2009 there are over 140 companies in 24 countries using VP/MS, e.g. Axa, Generali and Uniqa. A market research source[11] listed the following VP/MS users in the USA in 2008: American National, New York Life, Ohio National and Symetra.

gollark: My iGPU's Gen9, which doesn't suffer a horrible performance hit, but *really Intel*?!
gollark: Apparently Intel somehow even managed to muck up security of their iGPUs. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-gen7-hit&num=1
gollark: I'm going to make sure to, er, pay attention to handling uploads then. It's somewhat annoying from an ease of use perspective that it stores to files by default, but it does make sense for performance.
gollark: I can't see any obvious ones. The session is presumably encrypted, this will be running over HTTPS, maybe I could swap out SHA256 for an actual password hashing function though.
gollark: But with minor tweaks, like a persistent session store, an actual config file, a templating engine, sort of thing.

See also

Notes
  1. "VP/MS Product Flexibility" (PPT). 2007. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  2. "Making The Case For Centralized Processing" (PDF). James Daggett (Tech Decisions). 2007. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  3. "Visual Product Modeling System Brochure" (PDF). 2008. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  4. "Model Carrier Component Recognition". Globe Investor. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  5. "Visual Product Modeling System (VP/MS)". 2008. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  6. "CSC LEF Report on Open Source software" (PDF). CSC. 2004. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
  7. "Some Patterns for Insurance Systems" (PDF). Wolfgang Keller. 1997. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  8. "Life Annuities and Pensions". CSC. 2008. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  9. "Property and Casualty". CSC. 2008. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  10. "CSC signs four insurers to VPMS". finextra. 2004. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
  11. "Novarica list of US companies using VPMS in 2008". 2008. Archived from the original on June 22, 2009. Retrieved 2009-09-07.

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