​Oracle Intelligent Advisor is well known for providing self-service guidance to customers and agents.

But in some scenarios, headless decisions need to be automated for a lot of customer cases. Examples include calculating monthly benefit or other payment amounts, automating periodic financial account compliance checks, and generating follow up tasks on incidents for human review.

Oracle Intelligent Advisor is designed to make these high volume automated assessments easy to integrate, fast to process and economical to license:

  1. The batch assess service can efficiently calculate results for up to hundreds of cases at a time
  2. The Enterprise Assessment API and Intelligent Advisor cloud services provide cost effective licensing for high case volumes

Read on to understand how your organization can respond quickly when decision criteria change and eliminate the need for ongoing IT projects by taking advantage of Intelligent Advisor’s powerful and cost effective headless decision-making web services.

The Batch Assess REST API for batch case processing

At the time of writing the Oracle Intelligent Advisor Determinations API Batch Assess REST API is the recommended endpoint for performing high volume case assessments.

Each case passed to the API describes a customer situation for which multiple results can be returned, such as the start date, payment amount, and type of one or more benefits for which the customer is eligible.

With the Batch Assess REST API:

  • Pass up to thousands of cases in a single web service call
  • Use an efficient JSON format for case data and decisions returned
  • Always get results for valid cases, with errors returned only for cases with invalid data

Figure 1 – Three batches of 50 cases being passed to Batch Assess REST API

The chart below shows an example of throughput with the Batch Assess REST API, for different numbers of cases passed in a single API call.

Chart, line chart Description automatically generated

Policy models deployed with the “Web services” channel automatically provide the Batch Assess REST API endpoint. The web services channel is available with

  • Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service
  • Oracle Policy Automation Enterprise Assessment API Cloud Service
  • Oracle RightNow Universal Policy Automation Tier 3 Sessions

When Intelligent Advisor receives a batch of cases via the Batch Assess REST API, it works on them as quickly as it can. Multiple calls to the Batch Assess REST API can be made at the same time, up to the limit permitted by your cloud service instance. Any requests over the concurrent limit will be queued until an earlier request has completed.

Batch vs continuous event-driven processing

Intelligent Advisor provides rich authoring tools for business experts to define and maintain decision making logic. Each Intelligent Advisor project can then be deployed and reused across the organization wherever it is needed, ensuring consistent decisions are always made.

And Intelligent Advisor customers don’t only need fast batch processing, but also high volume continuous processing. For example, when new information comes in about a customer’s situation, you might want to immediately recalculate their risk rating, to ensure you are complying with financial regulations. In this case there might be millions of individual checks per day being returned by Intelligent Advisor, each with very short response times required.

Despite its name, the Batch Assess REST API is also designed to be called one case at a time, to support these continuous use cases. And regardless of whether you need batch or continuous processing, when purchasing Intelligent Advisor all that matters is the total volume of cases you need to process each month

Cost effective assessments at scale

To license Intelligent Advisor for high volume assessments either purchase Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service or OPA Enterprise Assessment API Cloud Service.

  • Enterprise Assessment API can be added on to existing B2C Service or Tier 3 Session subscriptions for example.
  • Whereas Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service is designed only for Fusion or standalone Intelligent Advisor customers. It is not compatible with B2C Service.

If you are licensed only for Tier 3 Sessions in your subscription, you can still call the Batch Assess REST API, but only for a single case at a time – and each such call consumes a Tier 3 session. Adding Enterprise Assessment API prevents any such calls from consuming a Tier 3 session – instead each case processed counts towards your assessment volume.

If you are licensed for Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service, every 20 assessments processed count as a single billable interaction.

With Enterprise Assessment API licensed in bundles of 1M assessments, and Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service licensed in bundles of 1,000 interactions, there are flexible options available to easily purchase mid to large scale assessment volumes.

Conclusion

The Batch Assess REST API provides an efficient way to incorporate high volume decision making into your batch and continuous enterprise processes, with an efficient JSON-based API. By managing assessment rules in Intelligent Advisor, your business experts are able to make time-critical updates to decision logic without needing to have complex IT projects.   

If you are planning to make thousands or millions of Intelligent Advisor API calls, talk to Oracle about adding Oracle Intelligent Advisor Cloud Service or Oracle Policy Automation Enterprise Assessment API Cloud Service to your subscription. Both are a cost effective option for incorporating agile, auditable decision making into your case processing lifecycle.

For more information consult the product documentation.

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