eiConsole for Reinsurance 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 PCS and ACORD RLC XSD and their associated metadata files 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 import XML representations of file formats such as SAP IDoc, AL3, EDIFACT, and Excel spreadsheets and flat file including associated documentation. | Unable to read spreadsheets or documentation requiring manual re-keying of information. | Thousands of hours |
| Provides templates for all of the ACORD PCS and ACORD RLC transactions (eliminating having to review implementation guides and custom defining transactions). | 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 |
| Provides the ability to import Source or Target XML formats as templates in the data mapping component making transformations to the desired XML format a simple “drag & drop” exercise. | Limited or no templates are available. | Thousands of hours |
| Support for mapping recursive elements (for example, multiple Parties differentiated by Role) eliminates the confusing and error-prone process of drawing connecting lines with ambiguous annotations. | Not available. The XSLT has to be manually created. | Thousands of hours |
| All of the Codelists (P&C) are automatically imported and mapped with “drag & drop” simplicity using an intuitive Tabular Mapper saving thousands of hours. | 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) |
| An integrated schema maintenance component includes standards-compliant schema maintenance features to allow users to manage internal canonical models and derivations, and extensions of insurance industry standards and upgrades to new releases of Standards. | Not available. | Thousands of hours |
| Support from insurance industry experts. | Usually not available. | Hundreds of hours |
| Includes a fully functional file specification editor that directly imports and transforms non-XML files such as SAP IDoc, AL3, EDIFACT, and Excel to and from an XML representation. | Usually not available. | Hundreds of hours |
| General Capabilities | ||
| Infrastructure agnostic – Platform, operating system, database, communication protocol and application server independent. | Often infrastructure dependent. | Depends on infrastructure |
| 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 |