Class Model in a Corporate Annual Report

I was leafing through the Annual Report of DLF – a leading real estate company in India – and saw the following diagram in it:

DLF Business Units

If you are proficient with modeling, you will immediately see this a nothing but a class model!

I continued reading through that report and finally derived the following model of their business:

DLF Business Units - Class Model

Quite a large business and I am not sure I got it entirely right. Further, each individual hotel / home / office construction is constituted as a separate company (DLF has 243 subsidiary companies)! I have not even attempted to model that – I have stopped with business units and joint ventures.

Why attempt such a model at all? You should ask that question to the guys from Ramco whose Ramco ERP is the ERP platform for DLF!

Oil Demand Structural Model

In a previous post, I used UML to model commodity futures trading in order to obtain a better understanding of the recent rise and fall of oil price.

In this post I shift my focus to demand for crude oil. I use the OPEC World Oil Outlook 2007 as my source.

OPEC uses an econometric model called World Energy Model to predict trends in crude oil supply and demand. While I am not interested in the complete econometric model per se, I found their fundamental demand structure quite instructive and have proceeded to model that in UML. I hope this model will provide you with additional useful examples of how UML can be applied to real-world situations.

Health Insurance Channels

Recently, I heard some buzz about channel modernization in the health insurance space but I could not get anyone to clarify what exactly they meant by this term. Hence, deciding that self-help is the best help, I took a shot at defining channels in the context of health insurance.

I restrict myself to group health insurance since a large percentage of health insurance in the United States is employer funded. 

As always, I rely on UML to represent my ideas. Specifically I use UML class diagrams to present my ideas.