Why are Business Rules Engines the right choice for Decision-making?

Business Rules Engines (BREs) serve to provide the organizations with a much-needed support system

Companies have to handle a lot of requests, needs and approvals on a daily basis. This differs from client to client. In order to handle all of this, companies usually rely on a predetermined criteria to evaluate what is requiredfollowed by routing it to the representative that turn out to be the best fit for the task. However, the problem kicks in when a large number of requests and needs are to be handled. Manual way of making rule-based decisions get chaotic as the number of requests and needs to handle increase. This is where a Business Rules Engine(BRE) comes into play. This serves to provide the organizations with a much-needed support system when it comes to rules-based decision management.

As manual Decision making gets chaotic after a certain point, automated Decision making comes to the rescue. Business Rules Engines focus on making automated decisions. Business Rules Engines are nothing but software-based tools that come in handy to make automated decisions where there are specific rules to follow. Some of the rules that might need to be followed are government regulations and organizational security policies to name a few.

There's no rocket science behind how BRE's work. They follow a simple input-output mechanism. An input data is given which is evaluated against a set of pre-programmed rules. After this, the information is delivered in the form of a decision. You provide an input and you get an output after being processed – it is that simple. The process that goes in is the logic based on the rules that have been specified already.

Models used by BRE's

Some of the models used by BRE's include –

• Backward-chaining methods based on a pre-defined set of goals
• Forward-chaining methods. For example – if/then rules, event-condition rules
• Fuzzy logic computing
• Deterministic models

What are the benefits of deploying BRE's?

BRE's have a lot of advantages to offer, which is why the demand for the same is insanely high among the organizations. Here are the benefits of deploying BRE's to make automated decisions –

1. Needless to say, as the decisions are automated, they are made faster when compared to that of manual decisions.

2. BRE's make it easy for the organizations to proceed further as these engines provide a consolidated view of their rules and decision-making history. This ensures that managing the software-related business rules is no longer complicated as there is a centralized point to manage all of this. This centralization also makes it easy beyond words for the companies to change and update rules as and when required.

3. Relying on BREs has served to provide operational advantage for the organizations.

4. Cleaning up the back end of applications with rules-based logic embedded in its code has got a lot easier by virtue of BRE.

5. You no longer have to run after each process and make sure that they comply with policies.BRE does this for you.

6. BRE process is transparent.

7. Since the tasks are automatically routed to the right person, the need of middleman is eliminated.

8. There is a drastic reduction in the number of errors thereby improving the quality of work.

With BRE's in place, you are not just automating the whole Decision making process but also bringing in a lot of other advantages for the company as well. Investing in these engines wouldn't go in vain.