Contrasting job, policy, product, and line of business
A policy transaction is an operation that creates, modifies, or ends a policy. There are several specific types of policy transactions, including submission, renewal, policy change, cancellation, and reinstatement.
A job is a PolicyCenter operation that executes a policy transaction. Within the context of PolicyCenter, the terms job and policy transaction are virtually synonymous, though "job" is used more often in the technical layer and "policy transaction" in the user interface.
Every job and every policy is associated with a specific type of product. A product is a type of policy offered by an insurer. For example, an insurer may have a "Personal Auto" product that is used to create personal auto policies.
A line of business (LOB) is a set of information that is used to define a type of product offered by an insurer. For example, "Personal Auto Line" is a line of business used to define the "Personal Auto" product.
Most products have a single line of business. For example, an insurer could offer a Commercial Property product that consists of a single line of business - the "Commercial Property Line". For these types of products, the product and the underlying LOB are often discussed interchangeably.
However, some products have multiple lines of business. For example, an insurer could offer a Commercial Package product that consists of two lines of business, the "Commercial Property Line" and the "General Liability Line". Note that these types of products are referred to as both multi-line products and package products.
Note that a given LOB could be:
- Used by only one product (which could be a single line or multi-line product)
- Used by multiple products (each of which could be a single line or multi-line product)