When it comes to running a successful organisation, good decision making is key. Business owners and execs make hundreds if not thousands of decisions a week; from ensuring compliance is upheld to establishing internal processes. Good decisions inspire staff and are the foundation for success. Business rules help organisations manage these important decisions and set you on the path for success. This article explores this in more detail.

Business rules are guidelines that help you determine, define or constrain the criteria or conditions that help you make a decision. These decisions affect certain aspects of a business.

Think about when you apply for a loan. There are questions that you must answer in order to get a loan, and your answers determine whether you qualify for the loan.

In most loan processing applications, there are various rules that fire based on your responses to questions. If you answer yes to one question or no to another question, your chances of approval for a loan will be impacted, and the subsequent questions will vary. These rules help guide you through the application process and help the company determine your eligibility and structure their business.

A business rules engine, commonly referred to as a BRE, is software that executes these business rules or decision logic, separately from application code. Managing business rules outside of code enables them to be maintained without programming, often by less technical users.

For example, the rules that determine whether you qualify for your loan and if so, the loan rate, can be separated from code. This means that as marketplace conditions or industry regulations change, the rules associated with lending—rules associated with minimum income, credit score or debt to loan ratio, etc —can be updated without a developer sifting through code. Separating business logic from application code makes it easier and faster to change business rules.

A business rules engine is part of a larger system called a business rules management system, or a BRMS (which will be covered in a later post.)

InRule’s business rules engine empowers technical and business users to author and manage business rules and calculations without coding. Your organisation can keep pace with changing marketplace needs with less effort, cost and risk than programming, increasing speed to market, reducing revenue leakage and operational risk.

For any more information, please contact us. We would be happy to help!