Use Cases of Business Rules Engines
Business rules engines are popular in industries like insurance, finance, and healthcare since they run countless rules every single day.
Rules engines are applications that handle business rules. Business rules are simple, yet powerful conditional statements that manage all the important processes in an organization. When these rules are run against a data set, the business rules engine outputs a true or false result.
Business rules can represent best practices, regulations, company policies, and so much more.
What is a Business Rules Engine?
Before business rules engines, business logic was embedded within the application code. This wasn’t the best approach since even the slightest changes to the business logic necessitated large amounts of coding. Typically, it would literally take months before the application was re-coded because the IT department would be busy with other tasks.
This presented an insurmountable hurdle to many businesses that relied on discounts and dynamic pricing to generate additional revenue.
Business rules engines were introduced as the solution to this problem.
A business rules engine is a piece of software that separates rules from the code and manages decisions using if-then statements to carry out actions.
A rule can represent company policy, for example:
If a first-time customer makes a purchase of over $200, then they receive a 10% discount with free shipping.
Rules engines are particularly effective where there are constant modifications in legal regulations or organizational rules which also demand logic changes.
Benefits
One of the defining features of rules engines is the ability to manage business rules without having to touch the application code. This gives non-technical users the ability to update rules without having to rely on the IT department.
As a result, organizations become more flexible and are able to respond to changing market conditions in real-time.
Operational Efficiency
Business rules engines free up IT resources giving technical team members more time to concentrate on higher-value tasks. Obviously, the IT department doesn’t know all the details of the business to effectively write all the necessary rules into an app. Rules engines empower organizations precisely because they give business users the ability to create rules in real-time.
Boosts Collaboration
Another benefit of business rules engines is that multiple teams can maintain and update an app. Businesses can leverage the expertise of their employees without having to train them to develop software.
So, to sum up, the most important benefits of business rules engines include:
- Maintaining applications is simpler
- Keeping the application flexible, which allows businesses to respond to market changes in real-time
- Free up resources and help companies realize the potential of team members
Business users have the ability to come up with innovative products without IT support. On the other hand, IT users are able to focus on other important tasks.
Final Thoughts
To get started, you need to integrate a business rules engine into an existing application. Once the integration is completed, the business rules engine can create and update rules and return the results the rules produce back to the app.
