The rules management system (Visual Rules) supports the automated execution of operational decisions in real-time by embedding into the Business Rules Engine (BRE) based on the recorded rules (i.e. the rules used to evaluate all necessary information relevant to the decision and arrive at the desired result). As these rules determine the processes currently in place and dictate how IT-based business operations are conducted, Visual Rules provides access to these rules in business terms so that business units can write, edit, modify and review rules as needed. Because these rules control action execution, changing the rules immediately modifies the decision without IT application changes and associated delays. Businesses are more agile, costs are reduced, and decisions are simplified. In addition, because business executives can view the rules that govern operational decisions, it ensures that current processes are properly validated, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of compliance management and decision accuracy.
Today, with the increasingly complex and ever-changing and highly competitive market conditions with globalization, enterprises are faced with the following difficulties:
1. More volatile, deeper/shorter cycles, and more risks.
2. More difficult to determine and less predictable.
3. More complex, multi-faceted and interconnected.
4. Different structures continue to change.
Growing risk and uncertainty conditions make cost control more important than ever to maintain profit margins and improve company robustness. But most important is the need for effective governance and auditability to ensure companies properly manage risk, control operations and comply with regulations and corporate policies.
Focus on customer service: The ever-changing, uncertain conditions combined with globalization and increased competition have further emphasized the need to retain customers and attract new business.
Reduce costs: In times of uncertainty and risk, reducing costs to secure profit margins and provide financial stability against major market changes is essential.
Governance: Change creates risk, so it is critical to continuously validate, measure and audit business results to ensure alignment, alignment and accuracy with corporate and regulatory objectives.
While business managers often have a solid understanding of the high-level processes that drive business, only decisions can control how these matters are performed in day-to-day business operations and thereby unlock the potential to create new value in operational execution. A simple example may help to understand the ensuing discussion. We often find that banks set limits in their loan approval systems that are higher than those required for regulatory approval. The rationale for this is that while the decision-making process for approving or denying a loan is usually fairly simple and can be easily handled by less experienced individuals, for more complex situations with larger loan amounts, a number of additional factors can arise that cannot be ignored: overall flow Sexuality levels, exposure to specific market sectors or organizations, questionable credit ratings, sensitive locations, and many other factors. Experienced regulatory involvement is therefore required. But such personnel are well-paid, and the complexity of the process may mean that each supervisor may read different materials, and thus may make different decisions. By putting these complex decision-making algorithms into a set of business rules, decisions will always be consistent and take effect immediately without waiting, and therefore without the involvement of high-paying people. In addition, because rules are clearly visible to business units, they can be adjusted and optimized based on operational performance while verifying compliance. But there is a problem. The information that controls decisions is often disseminated throughout the enterprise in different forms. Decisions may involve using office documents and spreadsheets, talking to other people, running specific IT applications, and following specific documenting procedures. As a result, the decision-making process is not only time-consuming, but depending on the information sources used, the results can be very different and difficult to verify or check. In addition to this, the increasing complexity and uncertainty reflected in the above surveys, coupled with the interconnected, interacting nature of the modern business, often results in senior executives complaining about poor decision-making. In other words, decisions are often made based on incorrect or insufficient information, and decisions cannot be made in a timely manner in response to customer or market demands. Visibility into the decision-making process is similarly poor, making it difficult to manage compliance and ensure a company's operations comply with internal and external policies and regulations. Worst of all, it is difficult to change the decision to achieve a different outcome because there is no clear understanding of how the decision currently works, and therefore no way to determine what needs to be changed. What we need is to automate decisions as much as possible to reduce costs and improve customer service, while standardizing and documenting the rules that govern decisions so that rules can be more easily checked, validated, and changed, improving governance and making the business more agile. This is where business rules engines and event technology come in. Through these two technologies, companies can automate decision-making, which is controlled by a set of business-context rules that can be written, viewed, and edited by business units themselves. Changes to these rules directly alter decisions in real-time operations without any involvement from IT staff, and the set of rules provides a clear and verifiable record of how business operations and decisions were made.
The main IT technology that supports decision management based on business rules is the business rules management system (Visual Rules). While this white paper is not intended to be an in-depth analysis of decision management techniques, it is useful to gain a high-level view of Visual Rules by clarifying the concept of Visual Rules. As described in the previous section, business rules are used to document the decision-making processes that are being used by people and applications throughout the enterprise, in the form of rules and stored in a business rules repository. Visual Rules provides a variety of tools for accessing this repository to change or view the content in the repository and manage the execution of rules as needed in day-to-day business operations. Because rules tend to be very detailed, for ease of use, they are often collected into rule sets that match specific operational activities. The Visual Rules runtime rule execution engine is often described as a business rules engine (Visual Rules).
A key feature of the Visual Rules rules engine is the business user interface. As mentioned above, in order to achieve flexibility and visibility, the interface must be comfortable for business experts and free from technical IT jargon. The business rules themselves should be in as concise language as possible so that business analysts and owners have a clear understanding of how decisions are made and the basis for them. Suppose a bank wants to improve competitiveness and customer retention by offering VIP customers better car loan rates. To reduce risk, the promotion is only for customers with a car purchase price of $20,000 or less, and for customers with a history of good financial management, the bank is prepared to offer an additional 40 basis points off the quoted rate. Business users looking at current promotion decisions might see rules like the following:
In addition to providing the ability to write, update, and check rules, business users might also want to measure how the rules are performing. For example, supervisors may want to know how often loan approval decisions turn to require supervisor approval; if this frequency is too high, the loan approval process will suffer. The response may be to ease conditions, requiring supervisory intervention, or to deploy more supervisory resources to handle the increased demand.
From the above description, we know some advantages of applying business rules and events to improve operational decision-making and management, let us describe these advantages
in
customer service. Processes that might have taken hours or days to complete can now be processed in minutes because decisions are made instantly, without human involvement or other delays. Removing the layer of abstraction between the business unit's rule definition and rule enforcement also ensures more accurate and repeatable decisions, further improving customer service. But a very important point revealed by using business rules to handle decisions is to carry out the process in a personalized way for a specific customer. Once automated business rules are implemented, point-in-time rules can be built so that decisions can be changed based on the different users for whom transactions are performed. This allows companies to focus more than ever on responding to different customers, opening up new business opportunities while ensuring a highly personalized level of customer service. This issue will be discussed further in the Smart Operations section.
Business Flexibility
Automated decision-making moves the decision-making process from the various locations where it currently resides and is consolidated into a single set of rules. This immediately speeds up the process of changing the decision, as business analysts now don't need to find out all the different documents, people and systems that implement the various parts of the decision-making process, just focus on the set of documented rules. In addition to this, as repeatedly mentioned in the analysis in this article, BRMS provides business users with tools to write and edit directly, without IT involvement during rule changes, ensuring that the application itself remains unaffected. The combination of these two features enables rule-based decision-making to evolve towards greater business flexibility, especially for decision-heavy processes.
reduce costs
The main route to cost reduction today is automation. Direct processing can be significantly improved by automating operational decisions using rules wherever possible, rather than relying on employees to talk to the right people, refer to the right documents, and choose the right applications to run. Predefined decisions replace human interaction as much as possible, reducing not only human time requirements, but also the need for training and learning. This enables more efficient use of resources and lower overall costs. In addition, the use of business rules also reduces the cost of change fees because now changing rules does not require any changes to IT applications.
Governance
Comprehensive governance benefits from a rules-based approach to decision-making. The first is that the adoption of business rules is a method of normalizing the decision-making process used to control operations. Increased automation, combined with the fact that decision rules are recorded in one location and easily accessible, means that operations are much more repeatable, predictable and auditable; decisions are no longer based on the skills of the specific people involved in executing business transactions, but is based on a set of canonical rules. This normalization reduces risk and opens new doors for the continuous auditing process. Because normalization is based on business-oriented rules, business owners can regularly review the rules being used to ensure that decisions are accurate and aligned with goals, deliver the best business results, and that the decision-making process as a whole complies with all relevant regulations and policies. Business contextual visibility into operational decisions delivered through rules-based decisions is an opportunity for collaboration. With easy-to-use authoring, browsing and editing tools, business units have the opportunity to collaborate to ensure the right decision-making process. Bringing together business experts across different disciplines ensures that decisions are optimized not just for specific parts of the business, but for the entire business. The best decisions thus established are equally accurate in both specific and general business contexts. Another area that has a lot to do with improving governance is measurement and tracking. With clear visibility into the rules that govern the decisions that govern business operations, the results of those decisions can now be monitored and analyzed. Still using the example used above, if loan approval decisions frequently require supervisor approval, this may indicate that the decision is not optimally executed effectively, or may require more supervisory human resources.