DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Posts Tagged ‘Business Process Automation’

The guys at Synoptic have released a great new video, highlighting the difference between popular flow charting tools and fully fledged Business Process modelling tools.

Over to you Creon…

So the news is not good. Apart from the obvious feelings of a new beginning (President Obama’s inaugoration) that is being projected by our US friends, the rest of the world seems a little less hopeful at least for the short term. Australia gained around 10,000 new people on the unemployment figures yesterday as BHP and Rio Tinto announced their various reforms and a global technology giant announced global redundancies in their thousands. To state the bledding obvious, everyones chief concern is about survival at the moment.

It’s a time to be focused on our objectives, make few mistakes and get results as quickly as we can. When it comes to IT projects, it’s important not only to get a return on investment but to get that return quickly. Its maybe for this reason that my company seems to be bucking the trend and doing steady business whilst other vendors seems to be slowing down. Our accelerated approach to custom software is able to play a vital role in the survival of businesses across Australia as budgets get tightened, and we are expected to do more with less.

So if you are unfamiliar with our approach, I’ll take you through the highlights.

Before I describe what it is. I’ll tell you what its not.

• Its not Agile development, its more than that. Whilst we also use Agile to accelerate the process. This is a just a small piece of the puzzle.
• Its not an accelerator, its more that that. In the world of software development accelerators can be used to speed up the software development process. Examples might be controls or reporting tools. We do that too.
• Its not code reuse, its more than that. Code or portions of code can be used during development from previous projects to allow for a lean delivery. An easy example to understand is demonstrated with a simple log in screen. Most of our customers need a log in screen for their project, so do we reinvent the wheel each time? No! We go way beyond code reuse.

So what is it then?

Solentive have developed an ‘ultra accelerator’ that allows us to deliver reliable, innovative solutions in a fraction of the time that other developers can. The ultra accelerator can be used on practically any workflow oriented application and comes with native connectivity technology (BUS) to facilitate the integration with other systems.

The approach ‘displaces’ a mountain of engineering effort by using the ultra accelerator, where other companies would normally be piecing code together or writing code from scratch. Further customization can then be performed to tailor the solution to your specific requirements.

Further to all this, our customers benefit from a very stable code base, user acceptance testing is minimised and the system is fast tracked to production.

Business processes can be automated or largely automated meaning with rules engine technology and workflow design tools so the potential for a huge return on investment is also available. For the price of a standard approach to your project, we are able to include reporting and SLA monitoring tools to ensure that your workforce is always on task and you are able to identify leakage in your productivity. Do more with less! No really!

We have enjoyed some great implementations for our customers so I thought it may be interesting to share our approach.

If a jobs worth doing its worth doing well and its worth doing now!

Do you have project? A question about software development? Are you lonely or bored and just fancy a chat ?

The door is always open as they say.

A recent study by CIO connect has confirmed the steady evolution of the CIO roles as we suspected.

Over 80% of respondants hold board positions or places on senior change management panels. 62% said they they were being turned to by board level collagues for “insight and leadership in business change”

CIO’ are finding themselves spending more time on business issues such as strategy, transformational change and project briefings.

”We are seeing CIOs emerging to take a leadership role in driving business change within their organisations,” said Nick Kirkland, chief executive at CIO Connect.

This affirms our launch of the MAMBA platform as an enterprise transformation engine allowing business and IT departments to work effectively together to keep pace of the change in a challenging operation environment.

Are you a business transformer? Do you need the tools to allow your business technology to keep pace with the relentlessly changing needs of the business? Get in touch to see how we can help you get ahead of the transformation curve…

Original article

The Rete Algorithm is a marked improvement on Sequentially organised systems. To understand the benefit you need to understand what it is not.

In a sequenial BRE, the rules are executed one at a time in a sequential order. The more rule you add, the more time is needed to work through them. Sequential Rules engines works prohibitively slowly for large or complexed implementations. The problem is further exasperated in solutions with a high amount of traffic.

Instead the Rete Algorithim is used as a way of calculating the quickest route to proceed through a ‘maze’ of rule. In simple terms, we are able to create rule about which rules to action. The obvious benefit is that the system can handle much larger amounts of data and faster and simulate business logic which is then automated.

I don’t know whats wrong with me this week. I just don’t seem to be able to resist the urge to write overly dramatic headlines. This one came from a weird train of thought I found myself having in a daydream like fashion on the way into work

Could we be at such a point in the ‘information age’ that if we haven’t automated your business by now, then you stand to fade away into the background wondering what happened.?

Quickly I realised that the answer was no. Stupid thought really. In fact I think we are some way away from it from many of us, but I then payed some more serious attention to a bigger question. If it IS coming, when will that day be?

In many ways we have technology available to us that is only limited by either our imagination or our courage to act. We are able to automate things that managers wouldn’t ever dream were possible. Its only our ignorance that prevents us from benefiting.

Some further food for thought. Since some businesses are find things tough right now… Imagine if you were able to automate some or all of what you did. You knew your customers better, you served customers better. Your service levels were better. Perhaps everything was better

Imagine if only you had the secret. Imagine how the competition would marvel at how you did it. Perhaps its not such a distant dream after all?

Grow in a slowdown and reduce your headcount…  Wow did I just say reduce your headcount. Erm what I meant to say was ’streamline your operations’ or ‘reduce you reliance in manual processes’.

Come on lets get real. There are some businesses out there that need to reduce costs right now and quickly. No-one likes loosing good people but its a harsh reality of business at the moment.

Whether this is part of your cost reduction strategy or not Business Process Automation is an important component in creating a leaner meaner fighting machine to weather the Recession storm that is now upon us and forecast to deepen.

We have recently put the finishing touches on our workflow automation ‘core’ we should really put some thought into giving it a fancy title shouldn’t we? We have been using this to connect to a businesses existing systems as a way of both monitoring the traffic of the workflow as well as having the ‘intelligence’ to assign task to other users. The intelligence in question is a series of business rule unique to your business.

Lets pick an industry. Say Logistics. A consignment is entered into the system for pick up and the system calculates the closest vehicle to pick it up. In its calculation the following rules are considered

• The the vehicle too large for the customers premises
• Is there room on the vehicle?
• Is the vehicle over weight?
• Will the extra job force the driver or exceed his hours or rest breaks

The system automatically notifies the driver, The driver accepts the job and the system texts the customer to confirm confirmation.

The rules in question are applicable to any industry but in this example we have built business logic into the role of Transport operations manager. The actions taken by the system are compliant with the companies policies for late pick up. The manager can handle more work and can focus time on account management or driver liaison which are more humanistic tasks.

If you need more clarification on Business Process Automation and what it can do for your business. Drop me a line. 0432 968684

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.