Life, Health & Annuities ACORD Tools
eiConsole Life/Annuities/Health (LAH) vs General Integration Tools
Use this chart to see how your integration solution stacks up to the award-winning eiConsole for Insurance
| eiConsole | Non-Insurance Specific Tools (NIT) | Impact |
| Ability to read in ACORD XSD and Metadata with a few mouse clicks. | Unable to read ACORD MetaData file eliminating critical documentation necessary to map fields to the ACORD schema. | Thousands of hours |
| Ability to read in the DTCC XLS spreadsheets including associated documentation. | Unable to read spreadsheets or documentation requiring manual re-keying of information. | Thousands of hours |
| Ability to search the ACORD and DTCC description and definitions from within the eiConsole Integrated Development Environment (IDE). | With Non-Insurance Specific Tools, you would have to leave the development environment to use other tools, and then once the appropriate matching field is found, manually input the data. | Thousands of hours |
| Templates for all of the ACORD and DTCC transactions. | Limited or no templates are available. | Thousands of hours |
| Ability to import Source or Target XML formats as templates in the Data Mapper Component. | Not available. The XSLT has to be manually created. | Thousands of hours |
| Support for mapping to recursive elements. For example, multiple Parties differentiated by Role. | NIT only allows one-to-one relationships between the source and target data, which is usually accomplished by connecting lines. The ACORD model requires repeating elements such as Party, which is defined by Role Code. | Thousands of hours (in some cases this has caused the project to fail) |
| Availability of a growing library of pre-configured interfaces. | Not available. | Thousands of hours |
| Support from insurance industry experts. | Usually not available. | Hundreds of hours |
| Simple upgrade from one release of ACORD/DTCC release to another using the XSD/Metadata or XLS import feature. | Since NIT can’t support the import of the MetaData, it also can’t support upgrades from one release to another. | Hundreds of hours |
| Built-in support for Typecodes (Life & Annuity) Tabular Values (DTCC). | NIT can’t read the MetaData file, therefore all of the Typecodes have to be input manually. There are thousands of them. | Thousands of hours |
| Ability to extend and save the ACORD Schema by automating the ACORD prescribed approach. | A manual process. | Hundreds of hours |
| Ability to “slice” the ACORD schema to create subschemas for specific transactions. | Unavailable from NIT. (ACORD recently licensed the eiConsole to use this feature). | Hundreds of hours |
| Ability to transform the DTCC data to an XSD and reuse it. | Typically not available. A manual process. | Hundreds of hours |
| All output is non-proprietary W3C compliant (XML and XSLT) and can be maintained without the eiConsole. | Data mapping typically uses proprietary languages and requires the use of the proprietary tools to maintain the interfaces. | The cost of being “locked in” to a vendor |
| General Capabilities | ||
| Infrastructure agnostic – Platform, operating system, database, communication protocol and application server independent. | Often infrastructure dependent. | Depends on infra-structure |
| Ability to import into Data Mapper any source and target formats. For example: XSD, XML, VSAM, DDL, ACORD and AL3. | Usually limited. Not available. | Hundreds of hours |
| Ability to manage (find, filter, sort) all of the interfaces | Not available. | Hundreds/thousands of hours |