Business Rules Automation Overview

There are certain types of software applications that capture and automate the rules with which a business operates. Such rules normally define the way with which an organization interacts with customer or carries out internal business processes. These rules are termed business rules and cover:

  • Procedures, best practice, regulations, methods & policies
  • Work-flow and process management
  • Employees' Know-how, skills and expertise relating to customers, products, services, resources, processes, operations and Risks.

Clearly the capture and automation of business / process rules can deliver significant competitive advantages to an organisation. However, the use of normal software development methods and languages (VB, C#, Java) is a very ineffective way of developing applications that contain business rules. This is because in a programming language, the logic of the business rules is inter-mixed with the overall logic of the program. This has the following drawbacks:

  • The slowness of the process of defining, capturing, testing and verification of the business rules components of the application.
  • The difficulty and speed of maintaining the business rules in a fast changing business environment.
  • The lack of transparency of the automated business rules code to the non-IT business domain expert.

The technology for automating business rules, by overcoming the above drawbacks, has over the years been given many labels; "Rule Based Systems", "Knowledge Based Systems", "Expert Systems" and "Business Rules Management Systems". These technologies share the basic design concept of separating the business rules from the application that runs the rules. The business rules are maintained in a file which is run by a generic software component called the "Inference Engine" or "rules engine".

The main advantage of separating the rules from the inference engine is the ease of development and maintenance of the business rules. With user friendly rules maintenance tools, the business rules can be developed, reviewed and maintained by the domain experts without requiring IT or programming skills.

Early technologies required that rules are defined in the IF THEN format shown below:

IF Item is document
THEN ShippingMethod is RecordedMail

IF Item is NOT document AND Weight < 4 AND Value < 40
THEN ShippingMethod is Parcel

The above representation is cumbersome to capture and difficult to maintain when the number of rules increase beyond 30 or so. Furthermore, it is difficult to asses if the set of rules is incomplete or if it contains conflicting rules. Modern systems such as XpertRule support a graphical Decision tree, which is a superior representation for this category of rules and it overcomes the limitation of IF THEN rules because of its readability and ease of authoring by non-IT business people.

Decision Tree

The other advantage of using decision trees is that the same tree representation can be used for representing rules as well as representing the flow of business processes and flow of decision making.

The benefits of capturing business rules into an application include:

  • Preserving the expertise of key employees
  • Compliance with external regulations and internal policies
  • Deploying best practice business knowledge accurately, consistently & rapidly across the organisation

The benefits of using a business rules automation technology for implementing business rules automation are:

  • Speed of rules capture
  • Transparency and accessibility of the captured rules to the non-IT business users
  • The ability to respond fast to changes in the business, regulations or markets through the ease of maintenance of the captured rules

Currently business rules automation is seen as a key enabling technology for customer service over the Web or in Contact Centres. Example of customer service applications are:

  • Fact finding, need analysis, product recommendation and generating quotations.
  • Sales scripting such as advisory, cross-selling, customer retention, and complaint handling.
  • Technical support; Problem diagnostic, trouble-shooting and resolution
  • Public Sector On-line advisory systems such as entitlement to social benefits, tax calculation and similar.
  • Guided selling to match customer needs to configurable products and services and the generation of quotations and proposals
  • Advising on regulatory compliance e.g. health & safety. Money laundering, sex discrimination, building planning regulations etc.
  • On-line applications and claims processing