DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for the ‘Business Process Automation’ Category

What is a BRE?

The Business Rules Engine (BRE) is a software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. A BRE can be used in Business Process Automation to significantly streamline the operational efficiency in a business.

A modern BRE is best thought of a rule management system. The rules of a business can change as the business grows or evolves. Certain rules may be applicable within a certain timeframe for example and therefore Business rules need to be updated and managed with the changing needs of the business.

The BRE can be used as a vehicle to translate ‘business logic’ into information workflows.

What are Business Rules?

Rules are everywhere. In fact a good business is valued or assessed on its systems, policies and procedures. These can also be known as business rules.

Business rules are visible in all businesses from SMB to Corporate. If you are able to document and map your business rules, you stand a good chance of significantly increasing the efficiency of your business through software and automation of some of your business processes.

The following table provides examples of some of the rules that might effect decisions in various industries.

You will notice that all business rules can be summarised into two categories

Either IF – THEN statements or IF – THEN – ELSE statements

The IF – THEN statement is also known as an inference rule and can be used to look up make decisions such as ‘Should this customer be approved for a mortgage?’ by executing rules of the form “IF some-condition THEN allow-customer-a-mortgage”. They can also be used to create fact tables which may allow the system to statements such as. If the conditions are ‘wet’ and the vehicle is over 1.5 tonnes, then the maximum permitted speed is 40 kph in populated areas.

The other condition, the IF – THEN- ELSE statement is also referred to as an ‘Event Condition Action’ rule.

Modern Rules Engines can really be considered rule management systems. For instance our rules engine provides a rule authoring environment, as well as a server, testing environment and library. Effectively a library of rules can be written, reused, activated and deactivated over time.

The rules are no longer in the control of a programmer but a business analyst who can write or modify the rules in Domain Specific Language (DSL). This means that the rules are written in a language that is industry specific rather than code.

How can is it used?

Our BRE can be used as part of a customworkflow solution or a part of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in unison with Biztalk.

A interesting application for a BRE could in the automation of a help desk functionality. Where a large knowledge base exists, the BRE can be used to understand where the knowledge base is applicable through rules.

More reasons to use a BRE…

Every business is different Our rules engine is may deliver some or all of the following benefits.

·
Drastically
reduce development time and costs

o
From
5000 lines of code in C# to 150 lines of code in the BRE.

·
Significantly
reduce maintenance cost.

·
Change
business rules on the fly – less change requests and less programming!

·
Build
a faster more reactive business systems.

·
Protect
data consistency by using a BRE to handle complex calculations.

·
Remove
manual Processes where possible

·
Allocate
human resources to more humanistic tasks.

·
Free
up your overstretched IT department.

Need to know more?

If you need to know more or have any questions about how BRE can help your business, feel free to contact us.

Imagine you wanted to pull different information from several different systems to create a singular and convenient view. This could be a real time snapshot of your business, your customer, your goods your employee…. what ever. These systems may not naturally communicate with each other so a further application is needed. This application for lack of a better way of explaining it ‘directs traffic,’ whilst hosting and applying business logic predetermined by the developer. That application is Microsoft Biztalk.

Since its release in 2000 Biztalk has sparked a wave of IT integration in modern business and challenged the notion that System integration or Business Process automation need be prohibitively expensive. It is now in its sixth release and it going from strength to strength.

Quick Facts

• Over 7,000 customers worldwide
• 90% of the Fortune Global 100 use BizTalk Server
• Leader in the 2007 Gartner Application Infrastructure and Back-End Application Integration Magic Quadrants
• Leader in the 2007 Application Server Platforms: Conventional Web, Conventional SOA and Independent SOA Forrester Waves
• 12 of the 15 largest retailers in the world run BizTalk Server

Biztalk works across platforms and Frameworks via adapters that ‘plug in’ to Biztalk and interface with the applications. An experienced developer or system intergrator can also build the adapters.

The advantage of Biztalk in your business can be enormous. It includes greater data integrity, faster communication, real time reporting, Business Activity Monitoring, greater collaboration and more. The need for System integration has become common place in many sizable businesses.

To find out how Biztalk can benefit your business, why not take advantage of a free consultation (top of the page)

Further Information

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/default.aspx

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/3/c/e3c6b6d8-7fec-459e-9479-1cd320019244/Introducing%20Microsoft%20BizTalk%20Server%202006%20R2.pdf

Where were you?

The first ‘meet up’ was a bit of an experiment so it was great that a small but targeted group turned up to see what I have been banging on about The group ranged from ‘hardcore technologists’ to people with much more of a business related interest.

If you want to join us next time around, then join us at

http://ia.meetup.com/65/calendar/8164216/

Business Rules Engines

Its how we make sense of the world and crucial to the way we run our business. Without our systems, policies and procedures can we really say that we have a business?

So if we can understand our business rules, you can not only take control of your business but can take steps to automate it. This is approach is by no means new. The term business process automation has been around for some time. The problem has been that in todays ever changing business environment, the technology can’t always keep pace with the change.

Imagine if a technology existed where rules could be changed on the fly and set free to evolve as the business grows. Image the possibilities and the effect it could have on you business if you could automate major parts of it.

Business rule engines are one of the most exciting technologies of the modern age. I hope to meet people as excited this concept as I am.