IDIOM, a New Zealand decision automation software company has been named the winner of two Business Rules Excellence Awards (BREA), a new award designed to recognise the world’s most successful use of business rules. The prestigious global awards recognise the outstanding commercial success of IDIOM’s work with both PowerHealth, an Australian healthcare software developer, and professional services firm Deloitte New Zealand.

Mark Norton, CEO and Founder of IDIOM, says: “We’re delighted to be the only multiple winner of the inaugural Business Rules Excellence Awards, along with our partners PowerHealth and Deloitte. We’re very proud of the contribution our plug-n-play rules software has made to their software applications in terms of customer benefits, efficiencies and cost advantages.” IDIOM’s software gives business users hands-on control over defining and deploying specialist decision making expertise. Customers world-wide in local, state, and central government, health administration, insurance, finance, pensions, and many other domains use IDIOM’s plug-n-play rules to automate business algorithms on an industrial scale, quickly, correctly, and completely, to achieve more agile, more transparent, and more durable systems. The BREA review panel evaluated entries based on business and operational impact, innovation and implementation. IDIOM was named a winner with PowerHealth, which provides its PowerPerformance Manager and PowerBilling and Revenue Collection applications to healthcare organizations worldwide as commercial-off-the-shelf applications. IDIOM’s plug-n-play rules technology was used to separate the costing/revenue and billing rules from the underlying applications, enabling users to create their own rules to address wide variations in jurisdictional and institutional practice. Patrick Power, Managing Director of PowerHealth, said: “We’re delighted to have received this award with IDIOM. We are very proud of the millions of dollars our software has saved healthcare organisations in Australia, New Zealand and across the world by enabling greater efficiencies, including those driven by the implementation of business rules in our applications. “IDIOM’s plug-n-play rules have reduced development cost and time for PowerHealth as we have a single commercial-off-the-shelf system worldwide. Customers also benefit from increased independence, agility, and transparency as the easy-to-use tools allow them to build and manage the business algorithms by exception.” Mr Norton adds, “We’re pleased to have played a part in PowerHealth’s success. Since the implementation of their rules initiative, PowerHealth has become one of the world’s largest suppliers of health costing/revenue and billing software.” IDIOM was also named a winner in the BREA with Deloitte New Zealand, who use IDIOM to define payroll recalculation and remediation algorithms to support compliance with the NZ Holidays Act (2003), which was not fully supported by some payroll systems. Darren Wood, Partner – Consulting, Deloitte New Zealand, says: “Working with IDIOM we are able to deliver highly effective payroll recalculation and remediation services to our clients throughout New Zealand. Our recalculations are developed using a single and definitive implementation of the Holidays Act algorithm, regardless of which payroll system is in focus. This provides a core base which enables consistent and repeatable calculations compliant with the Act.” Since 2001, IDIOM has pioneered the development and use of decision-oriented concepts to repower the systems that are at the heart of any large organization. The company has offices in NZ, Australia, and the US, serving hundreds of customers and partners world-wide. Mr Norton says, “Our software tools and development approaches are disruptive in the best possible way, returning real control of the algorithms that lie at the heart of commercial systems back to their business owners. The effect is to make their systems more agile, more transparent, and more durable, while at the same time reducing the time, cost, and risk to develop. We are fundamentally remaking the economics of software development by delivering these desirable and critical changes, quickly, safely, and at lower cost.” “In the decades since Business Rules emerged as a specialization, there has been little formal recognition of those who demonstrated excellence in the successful application of business rules,” notes Gladys Lam, awards Founder and Chair. “The Business Rules Excellence Awards now recognizes organizations worldwide who have excelled in implementing innovative BR solutions to meet strategic business objectives.”

The Business Rules Excellence Awards (BREA) was founded by Business Rules Solutions and is managed by Future Strategies Inc. BREA winners will receive their awards at a live presentation on 8 November in San Antonio, USA, in conjunction with the Building Business Capability conference.