What is Business Rules Engine and How to Choose It

A business rules engine is a powerful tool that can improve your business processes by helping you manage and execute business rules, but it’s not always easy to understand. In this article, we'll break down the business rules engine and explain how it works.

A business rules engine is becoming more popular as organizations look for ways to automate manual processes, thus saving time and money. This is especially important in light of the growing demand for automation in the digital economy. Businesses need a tool that can make decisions based on data from multiple sources.

Most business rules engines are used in a variety of industries, such as insurance, supply chain management, human resources, logistics, marketing, and sales, and have a broad range of applications. They are frequently used in financial institutions to aid in the automation of compliance procedures and risk management. They are also used in retail, where they aid in inventory management and pricing optimization.

Business Rules Engine Definition

So, what is business rules engine software? A business rules engine (BRE) is an application that enables you to automate business operations and the execution of business logic. It is used to fulfill a set of rules to reduce manual data entry and automate repetitive tasks such as reporting and eligibility requirements. Companies can use a BRE for decision-making, to cut costs, improve efficiency, reduce errors, and accelerate time-to-market.

The business rules engine lets you define what should happen in response to certain events or actions and automate decisions based on predefined and preloaded conditions. They are especially useful when there are many possible outcomes based on different conditions and criteria. For example, if a customer places an order for a product, you can define a set of business rules that determines how quickly it should be shipped and whether it should be delivered by mail or by truck.

What is the Purpose of a Business Rule Engine

The purpose of a BRE is to make sure that the decision-making process is consistent and follows company policy. Business rules engines can help improve decision-making processes by creating automated responses to situations that occur in real-time. The goal is to reduce human intervention in order to increase efficiency and accuracy as well as provide consistency across departments or locations.

Business Rules Engines are used for:

• Creating and maintaining software applications like CRM and ERP apps

• Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements like SOX, PCI, ISO 27001 etc.

• Managing exceptions and errors in your application

• Improving customer experience by providing them with consistent responses even if they enter incorrect data

• Managing user permissions on websites and apps

• Conducting compliance checks on sensitive data like credit card information

• Ensuring that orders are processed correctly by your warehouse management system (WMS)

Example of Business Rules Engine

Open source Rule Engine from EPAM allows you to create and manage business rules in Salesforce quickly on your own, without involving the IT department to write code. The solution is easy to read, create or modify without development, and is easy for understanding by people with no technical background. To use Rule Engine it’s only necessary to have basic knowledge of Salesforce.

Benefits of Business Rules Engines

The benefits of rules engines are numerous. It can help your business run more proficiently and accurately, while also helping you stay in compliance with regulations.

Here are some of the main advantages of using a business rules engine:

1. High efficiency

The most benefit of using business rule engines is that they help make processes more efficient. The software automates repetitive tasks that may need human attention, so employees don’t have to do them manually anymore. This frees up their time from making a lot of manual decisions for other tasks that need to be done instead of spending all day doing the same thing over and over again.

2. Improved precision

The software system ensures that everything is done correctly by verifying that all inputs are valid before performing any actions on them. Thus nothing gets lost or overlooked during the process, which can result in errors or mistakes being made later on down the line when you least expect it.

3. Increased Compliance and Auditing

Business rules engines help companies to stay in compliance with regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). They also help companies to audit their own data and understand if they're meeting compliance requirements. This way BRE ensures process owners know and follow the rules. The rules engine may not just monitor what people do, it can also monitor who does what, when, and how often they do it. If there is any deviation from the norm, this will be flagged for review immediately. The system will also allow you to see the history of compliance violations so that you can track trends over time and identify potential trouble spots before they occur.

4. Better Flexibility

The ability to make changes to the application without having to re-write code is extremely valuable. With an automated business rules engine, you can change the existing code without having to worry about breaking something else in the application. This also means that if someone else on your team makes a change, it won't affect other parts of your application that may not be affected by this change. It also helps ensure that any new features don't break existing ones as well.

5. Higher Productivity

Business rules engines allow IT professionals, and developers, to work together more efficiently by eliminating the need for rework due to errors during translation from English-like natural language rules into executable code. This means less downtime, fewer maintenance costs, and greater productivity for both IT staff and end users who need access to these rules while they are working on other projects within their respective workgroups.

6. Better Business Agility

BREs can enable businesses to make changes faster than before, allowing them to react more quickly and efficiently to opportunities as they arise. This enhances their agility and ability to compete effectively with other businesses in their industry. A well-designed business rule engine can improve decision-making and achieving business goals by providing context-sensitive information about how business decisions should be made based on current conditions and past outcomes.

7. Increased Decision Quality

BREs allow businesses to improve their decision quality by providing consistent results for each decision made across multiple systems within an organization or across different departments within each company. Informed decisions are made thanks to simple rules set in advance. Financial institutions, for example, can benefit from BRE when deciding whether to grant a loan or not. 

8. Reduced costs

Automating business rules helps reduce costs by reducing manual labor and enabling faster processing times. For example, in healthcare, it can increase productivity by automating manual processes that require multiple steps to complete one activity such as reporting patient data or creating prescriptions.

How Business Rules Engines Work

As we have already learned, a business rules engine is a software framework that automates business processes by implementing a set of pre-defined rules. These rules are based on criteria such as goals, company policies, and other parameters defined by a user. Depending on the type of BRE, it’s necessary to create decision tables, decision trees, pseudo-natural language, or programming-like code to set these rules. The engine uses these parameters to evaluate data from various sources and determine if an action needs to be taken based on the results of this evaluation.

Inputs and outputs for business rules engine

Business rules engine takes data as input and produces an output based on the business rules. In order to do this, it needs to parse the input data into a format that can be processed by the engine, execute the rules against this data, merge the results back into the output form that is expected by the user interface (UI) application, and finally display it in an understandable way. Business rules engines can receive inputs from multiple sources such as databases or spreadsheets. They also provide outputs such as notifications or alerts when certain conditions are met within your organization’s workflow process.

Types of Business Rules Engine

There are several types of business rules engines:

1. Script-based rule engine

This type uses a programming language to define the rules. The programmer writes the code and tests it before deploying it in production. Script-based engines are good for simple logic, but if you have complex logic, then this type of engine will not be suitable for you.

2. Declarative rule engine

The declarative rule engine is a more sophisticated type of business engine that can be used in an enterprise setting. It enables more complex workflows, decision logic-based BRE, and calculations to run in the background without the need for user input or involvement.

3. Hybrid rule engine

It combines the best features of both script-based and declarative engines. Hybrid rule engine has a graphical interface for ease of use, but it also supports programmatic development or coding-based bre.

4. Rule-based rule engines

This type of engine is very easy to use and can be used by non-technical people as well. The only drawback with this kind of engine is that it's not scalable and cannot handle complex logic easily.

5. Coding-based rule engine

This type of rules engine is good for complex logic, but it's difficult to write and maintain code because you need programming skills to create the rules using this kind of system.

Conclusion: How to Choose the Best Business Rules Engine

The best BRE for your company will be determined by your specific needs and requirements. However, there are some general guidelines you can follow to help you select the best engine for your company:

• Check that it is simple to use and understand and that your employees would be able to customize it as needed

• Check that the engine is scalable and capable of handling the growth of your organization

• Make sure it is adaptable and can be tailored to your organization's specific requirements

• Check that the engine is dependable and has a good reputation.

If you can identify areas of requirement and user demands, a business rules system can be extremely beneficial to your company. You can select the best type of BRE for your business based on the scope of tasks and level of complexity, and improve the efficiency of teams such as HR, office administration, finance, sales, purchasing, and so on. Process automation tools without code are a great way to set up a process without knowing how to code.