The Duck Creek Platform
is the technical foundation for all of our products and the embodiment of Duck Creek’s architectural and design philosophy. Inherent openness, configurability, and common functionality across Duck Creek applications speeds and simplifies processes, fosters transparency across functions, and brings more pertinent information to bear on every decision more quickly.
Benefits include:
Low-code configuration. At the heart of the Duck Creek Platform is a philosophy and commitment to externalize the rules that make your business unique from the code of your core platform. This overriding technical philosophy drives our technical architecture and unifies our product strategy. The following areas can easily be changed by business users:
- Release cycle management: requirements, documentation, and testing; rapid product configuration and updates; product, project, and task management
- Management configuration: organization, forms, tasks, groups; automated assignment, financial authority, supplier management
Open architecture. In today’s insurance market, every transaction, workflow, and a decision must be informed by as much data and knowledge as possible. Openness is critical to a carrier’s success. Allowing carriers to choose from the best set of available data and services from the insurance vendor ecosystem quickly, easily, and affordably creates the best possible outcomes for their insureds and their business.
Single point of change. The following areas can be easily managed and changed by business and IT users throughout all solutions with a single entry:
- Complete product definition environment: rating, rules, screens, forms, and workflows; regression testing and product modeling; database, warehouse, and analytics support
- Management configuration: user interface displays, valid values, expressions; rules, processes, events, data
A three-tiered stack. Duck Creek solutions are developed on the .NET Framework, composed in C#, and run on a Windows® Server environment. JavaScript and AJAX provide rich customer features. Page styles are driven by the Duck Creek Design System, a productized set of CSS with support for personalized themes, custom styles, and branding.
The overall architecture is a modern, three-tiered stack, providing (logical or physical) (separation or unification) of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. The web tier provides a web-based rating user interface. The application tier consists of the business and application components and services providing the functionality that supports all aspects of selling and servicing insurance products in addition to end-to-end claims processing. Additional access channels can leverage the full scope of existing business processing capabilities through service level interactions to decrease time to market and achieve consistency of business processing/rules. Integration to enterprise systems or third-party vendors is supported through point-to-point service level interactions and through enterprise messaging protocols. View logic and business logic are loosely coupled and can be tested independently, providing flexibility in automated testing solutions. The data tier houses referential, transactional, and operational data for system operations, and runs on the Microsoft® SQL Server platform.
Our future-ready architecture provides clear separation between customers’ insurance product definitions (Intellectual Property or IP) and Duck Creek Platform code. This separation allows for solution upgrades to be installed without reworking defined insurance products.
Test automation center, a robust and reliable toolset for building automated test scripts for Duck Creek Web applications, supporting a wide range of browser technologies. It is designed from the top down for business users to quickly create high-quality automated test scripts with limited technical knowledge. Test automation becomes simple, decreasing the time required for testing and increasing speed to market.
Test automation center benefits include:
- Focus on test development, not testing system architecture, enabling better quality at lower cost
- Presents test developer with objects available in a Duck Creek solution ManuScript, eliminating guesswork and speeding up test development – thus improving overall test coverage without increasing costs
- Update tests simply and painlessly – tests can be updated as quickly as developers can release changes
- Cuts testing costs in half with superior coverage when compared to any other available technology
- No coding or scripting required
- Parameterize data used by test scripts with Data Tables
- Create automated test scripts as a product is being built, utilizing Agile methodologies
- Store each test script as a single XML file for easy version control and maintenance
- Execute sets of test scripts with Batch Runner
- Command line support for executing test scripts via command line, allowing test script execution process to be automated or integrated with other tools
Customer 360. This toolset provides a complete perspective of the relationship between a carrier and its customers in a single view for the user, without having to navigate through disparate applications. This view includes policies/quotes, claims, and bill accounts from Duck Creek solutions and can be extended to include information from other external third-party systems. Users are able to view both quick, at-a-glance summary information and more detailed information, with the ability to navigate directly to the system of record.
Balancing and controls. This toolset supports balancing of transactions that flow through the Duck Creek Platform, and from third-party systems, with audit logs of errors to ensure accuracy of system balancing.