Business Rules Management 101

Business Rules Management is the process of developing, editing, executing, and storing business rules and its outcome is a business decision. Taking a single decision, may involve numerous business rules requiring several steps moving back and forth demanding the organizations to use a Business Rules Management System in their businesses.

Apart from user-friendliness, cost, and performance, these are the important facts to consider in a business rules management system:

• Traceability: At any given time and circumstance, you should be able to track the business rules, exceptions, and performance to perform impact analysis
• Reusability: Reuse the business rules and decisions where is it possible
• Homogeneity: Keep the consistency and standard throughout the whole process

However, along with the rise of the need for better business rules management, there are certain challenges that organizations require to address to provide a quality service.

Challenges in Business Rules Management

These are the major challenges in business rules management.

1. ‘Big Bucket of Rules' Problem
   Having to manage a big bucket of business rules in a single system is complex. Each rule may have different attributes, dependencies, and relationships making it more complex.
2. Difficult to maintain
   Since the business rules change over time, it gets difficult to make changes without breaking the existing system. It makes it hard to create, test, and deploy.
3. Business users and technical users cannot speak the same language
   Business rules that are implemented using a programming language are buried inside a piece of software code that requires a technical person to understand the interpretation and then a business user to understand the business rule. To make changes or even find errors, requires more resources consuming more time and energy.

The result of all these challenges has a direct effect on the decisions made in an organization. That is why it is important to be able to focus on business decisions, and model and automate business rules and decisions.

Managers at a typical Fortune 500 company may waste more than 500,000 days a year on ineffective decision making.

–McKinsey

To give you a better understanding, let’s think of a scenario where a group of players ends up getting the same score in a game. Then, the judging panel must make a collective decision with proper reasoning which can be complex. Let's see how to model this scenario with tiebreaking rules.

Sample Project: Modeling Tiebreaking Rules

The sample project shows how to find the players’ ranking of a game if they have similar raking points. Predefined tiebreaking rules are applied to rank the players.

• The business rules are implemented in a Decision Table to make it easier to understand by both business and technical users.
• Business Glossary is used to define the business terms in the decision table.
• Boxed Expressions are used to define the formulas used in the decision table.

At the end, all the components are linked together in a Generic Flow to automate the whole process.

The complete tutorial can be found in this article.

Let’s see how this automated process can improve the product and service deliverables in your organization.

How a Better Business Rules Management Can Shape Your Business

A business rules management system can help with the challenges of managing business rules which will enhance the overall quality of an organization in decision-making processes.

Mainly it helps to map the whole complex set of business rules in a more manageable manner. This allows both business and technical users to speak the same language, and easily understand the decisions making it easier to manage and giving them more control over business decisions. This way they can reduce time to market and decrease the cost of applying changes ensuring compliance with legislation and laws.

Ultimately it enables organizations to save time, money, and resources. The time it takes to understand the business rules, make changes, test, and redeploy is saved, lesser errors and lesser time to fix the errors. For example, in the above sample scenario, we have used a decision table to define the business rules which takes just a few seconds to make changes and redeploy. Moreover, it simplifies the process of software development in IT departments, as for these kinds of changes there will not be a need for re-coding the applications, going through complete testing and regression testing, and the re-deployment of the solution.

Conclusion

Constant changes in business requirements, regulations, laws, and market dynamics have made enterprises update their business rules frequently. At the same time, they must maintain the customer satisfaction level up with an easy-to-use, high-performing, and cost-effective solution. Most importantly, we cannot and should not fully focus on individual business rule. Instead, our main goal should be managing business decisions. A business rules management system must satisfy all these requirements providing an agile, flexible, and robust system to determine the action based on any given condition. In the end, it enhances the capabilities of an organization while delivering business values e.g. providing a quality highly customized service to the customers based on their situations.

Last updated December 1st, 2021 at 11:04 am, Published February 11th, 2021 at 11:04 am

Subhashi Jayasekara

Product Engineer at FlexRule – She focuses on analyzing and understanding customer requirements and identifying process. She also works in the emerging areas of technology such as Decision Robotics, testing and ensuring that the product functionalities align with the customer requirements.