What Is a Rules Engine?
A business rules engine is a software that enables business users without IT skills to capture, implement and change business logic in any process and application.
Why A Rules Engine Is Essential For Digital Business
In our digital world, companies need to innovate fast and adjust quickly to dynamic markets. The business rules engine offers a solution. It empowers business people, helps overcome the IT bottleneck and brings agility to digital business operations.
Applications
Rule engines are used to drive automation with the agility demanded by digital business operations. The areas of application are manifold.
Sales & Marketing
Finance & Controlling
Insurance
Credit & Risk
- Consumer lending
- Credit risk rating
- Financial spreading
Business Automation
Why Use a Rules Engine?
With a rule engine, companies can halve the time-to-market and implement changes up to 10 times faster. But there are even more reasons.
If the business rules, e.g. for performing an age verification, were hard-coded within an application, they were intransparent, difficult to change and might be inconsistent in various applications or channels.
How Does It Work?
Business users model their requirements in the form of rules that can be executed automatically. These rules can be embedded into any application or called by any process as a service.
Decoupling Business And IT Cycles
Typically, business requirements changes more frequently than IT applications or business processes. Pricing specialists might want to adjust their policies on a weekly basis, or insurance claims professionals might need to change settlement processes on their own. Business rules management makes all this possible.
More Business Enablement, Less IT Bottleneck
In the fast-paced digital world, companies need to resolve the IT bottleneck and empower their business people.
Business
Business departments are looking for faster ways to deliver software solutions – solutions that meet their requirements, that can be defined by the domain experts themselves and that can be changed without IT support.
Business Responsibilities:
- Business requirements
- Rule modeling and authoring
- Simulation and testing
- Documentation
IT
IT departments can be relieved from implementing ever-changing business requirements. Instead, the scarce IT resources deal with core IT tasks that are the basis for digital business transformation.
IT Responsibilities:
- Architecture
- Integration
- Deployment
- Infrastructure
When Should You Use A Rules Engine?
There are some typical scenarios, when companies benefit from rules engines.
Change business logic more frequently
Make business logic more transparent
Organize and structure lots of rules
Centralize dispersed business logic
Automate repetitive tasks
