4 Benefits of a Business Rules Engine
1. Return On Investment
All businesses are rules-centric. The flow of information, projects and money are all based on rules Most companies that implement a business rules engine see an 2X ROI within the first 6 months of going live in production with their first process. This allows the reassignment of IT resources that were responsible for managing these rules to other initiatives and put the control in the hands of the Operations.
2. Automation
Being able to remove manual work and having a set of rules automatically making workflow decisions has been deployed more rapidly over the last 2 years but has been around for a long time. The idea to strategically implement processes to automatically run repetitively, gives the opportunity to businesses to grow exponentially is exciting.
3. Ability To Easily Manage & Change Business Rules
Utilizing a Business Analyst or Operations to update and make changes to the rules and not relying on IT development resources gives companies a huge lift in efficiency. In most companies, change happen often, whether it be related to new laws & regulations or companies update their processes. The ability to adapt and implement these updates in short order keeps you in compliance along with making your client or internal executives happy.
4. Easily Test and Debug
Most Business Rules Engines have an intuitive visual testing and debugging process. Testing is just as important as creating and implementing the actual rules, if they don’t work in production then you have caused a bigger issue than intended. Allowing for an easy to use process, streamlines the overall time to roll out the needed functionality.
Summary
Evaluating and implementing a business rules engine should be in all mid-level to enterprise companies. Business rules can be configured in a number of different formats including: tables, statements, trees and along with others. Rules can be leveraged within workflows, from other applications using REST, SOAP API and even run on batch file data which is what makes it such a powerful tool to have.
Author Contact: Matt@emprise1.com
