New Features

Separate Business Content packaging. The packaging of Insurance-specific Business Content updates has been separated from the release schedule of the underlying core engine so that we can provide more regular business functionality updates, independent of updates to the core engine.

Omni-Insurance Business Content v18.0. The latest version of Omni-Insurance Business Content has been updated to include the following:

• Deployment Bundle. Model expanded to include 50+ Subjects with over 15,000 attributes, based on ACORD/OMG standards and integration experience with commercial and proprietary operational systems, such as Duck Creek Policy, Guidewire ClaimCenter, Salesforce, and others.

• Consumption Views. Over 120 tables and views that provide a data access layer, de-normalizing and further indexing the data loaded into the platform, so that it is more easily consumed for use in downstream applications, such as BI and analytics.

• Metrics Views. A growing list of more than 20 Metrics Views that can be configured for your implementation to further calculate and aggregate the Consumption Views, providing hundreds of measures across more than a dozen dimensions to facilitate consumption of your enterprise data.

• WebFOCUS Content. Over 60 out-of-the-box WebFOCUS visualizations, pre-configured for use with the Consumption and Metrics Views and organized into sample portal pages to quickly analyze your data and jump-start your applications.

For more specific details, see the Omni Insurance Business Content Release Guide and the Omni-Insurance Business Content Upgrade Guide.

Additional Bundle Deployment Options. In addition to the Update Bundle functionality in prior releases, the following options have been added:

• Update Data Model. This option enables you to upgrade the model without affecting the already deployed Data Quality Plans, making it easier to implement data model changes provided in subsequent releases of Omni-Insurance.

• Update Data Quality Plans. This option enables you to upgrade the Data Quality plans without affecting the already deployed Data Model, making it easier to deploy incremental customer-specific Data Quality plan changes.

For more details, see the Omni Console User's Guide, or Omni Console Help.

New Deployment History option. This new option allows you to see prior Deployment History at a glance, with several new features available per Deployment.

• Current Deployment. This option allows you to download the currently Deployed Data Model and Data Quality Plans as a Deployment Bundle for ease of propagation to other environments.

• Deployment Bundle. This option allows you to download the Bundle that was used to affect a specific Update Bundle, Update Data Model, or Update Data Quality Plans operation.

For more details, see the Omni Console User’s Guide, or Omni Console Help.

New Data Quality Pre-checks. This new feature helps protect the integrator from introducing downstream processing failures through simple data integration validations, such as:

• Trimming leading and trailing characters <= 0x20 from data elements that participate in the construction of <subject>_id columns.
• Replacing “:” or embedded whitespace characters in data elements that participate in the construction of <subject>_id columns.
• In addition to the existing null check, ensuring that the batch_id on os_ramp_control is not an empty string.

New Data Purge. During the course of on-going incremental processing, instances, masters, and their children can be marked for soft-delete from the system. This feature allows you to schedule the automatic physical deletion of stale soft-deleted records from the system on a configurable interval.

For more details, see the Purging Inactive Data topic in the Omni-Insurance Operation and Management User’s Guide.

New Blocked Work Order Status. The console now provides more information explaining why a work order that is ready to process may be blocked from execution, making it is easier to troubleshoot.

New Reset Environment option. This new drop-down option on the Deployment screen, allows you to obtain a clean slate on the development or QA environment at the click of a button.

• Model AND System Tables. Truncates all application tables, allowing you to start fresh in a Development or Test environment, as if you had just deployed the bundle for the first time.

• Model Tables. This option truncates all model-related tables, and leaves system tables intact.

For more details, see the Omni Console User’s Guide, or Omni Console Help.

New Reset Subject option. Mirroring the functionality of the Model Tables option of Reset Environment, the Reset Subject button on the Deployment screen provides more granular control to reset a single subject at the click of a button, purging ramp, source, instance, history, and master tables, as appropriate just for the selected subject.

For more details, see the Omni Console User’s Guide, or Omni Console Help.

New Subject Workflow Management. This fine-grained processing control option on the Deployment screen allows you to suspend certain work order items, such as Match, Merge, Remediation, CDC publishing, or History while iterating during early development phases. It additionally it allows you to choose whether mastering occurs sequentially or in parallel, as further outlined below in Performance and Throughput.

For more details, see the Omni Console User’s Guide, or Omni Console Help.

New Dispatcher and Debug Toggles for Work Orders. This allows you to Pause the dispatcher to temporarily suspend processing or enable single-step debug processing to occur. During Debug processing, the system pauses after each Work Order Item in Development or Test to identify any data-related processing anomalies that may occur.

For more details, see the Omni Console User’s Guide, or Omni Console Help.

Expanded Omni-Gen Services. Omni-Insurance is designed with a micro-services approach and enables many of its functions to be accessible through APIs. This enables other applications to seamlessly integrate with Omni-Insurance provided services using the industry standard approach.

For more information, see the Omni-Insurance API Services Reference Guide.

Section 508 Accessibility Improvements. Upgraded underlying third-party software components, in supporting of Section 508 Accessibility improvements in the Omni-Insurance Governance Console.

Expanded On-Ramp Processing Options. In order to meet tighter processing windows for very large volumes of data, several new processing options have been added that optimize the configuration of os_ramp_control.

• batch_type = INSERT_ONLY. Omni processing is optimized to skip internal Change Data Capture processes to facilitate large initial loads, assuming direct inserts.

• data_transfer_mode = NATIVE_SQL. A performance optimization that shifts internal processing to the DB Server for significantly large batches.

  Note: SQLServer and PostgreSQL are the only DBMS's currently supported by Version 3.12.

• change_detection = IGNORE. Standard work order processing is performance optimized to skip steps of the Work Order when the parent and child instancerecords have not been changed.

  This option forces the Omni Server to bypass this optimization, and is generally used as a recovery step in the event that an error occurs during processing of a given batch.

  It ensures that all instances in the ramp batch propagate to instance and quality operations, even if they have not changed.

  Important: See the Omni-Insurance Integration Services User’s Guide for key updates on using the new os_ramp_control options, while converting from the older, deprecated os_ramp_control options.

New Parallel Processing Option for Non-Mastered Subjects. In Version 3.8, the Omni-Insurance dispatcher service was gated at processing no more than one Work Order per Subject at a time. This was essential for Mastered Subject workflows, and was similarly adopted for non-Mastered Subjects.

Version 3.12 introduces the ability to process the same Subject from several different sources in parallel by working in concert with partitioning schemes on your DBMS. This feature significantly reduces cycle time for customers with multiple sources by distributing the load for larger transactional subjects.

For more information on setting up parallel processing options, see the Omni-Insurance Operation and Management User’s Guide.

New Parallel Processing Option for Mastered Subjects. By decoupling Mastering processes from Ramp to Instance processing, and allowing you to make a minor configuration setting to execute groups of mastered instances in parallel, overall processing time can been further reduced. Instead of one call to the matching engine for each Work Order, you can now execute the Mastered Instances from multiple sources in parallel, and make a single call to the Matching engine when all are complete.

For more information on setting up parallel processing options, see the Omni-Insurance Operation and Management User’s Guide.

Server population of the hashkeys. Since numeric keys are required for some database technologies that can host the Consumption Views, Omni-Insurance currently relies on a database function to generate a hash key for every Subject and Child in the model. To improve the overall efficiency of this operation, the Omni-Insurance core engine will now inherently create the *_id_hk that will be used by Consumption Views in a consistent manner for each implementation. When fully implemented, this new feature will improve the day-to-day processing time of the Consumption Views (particularly for larger implementations), and reduce the overall complexity of installation.

Important: During bundle deployment of Version 3.12, a one-time script will execute to update all of the _hsh columns throughout the implementation.