How to manage and simplify complex business rules and processes to increase your agility

To increase your agility, you need to shorten decision-making cycles and automate business processes as much as possible.It is also a route to improving your quality of service, ensuring SLAs are met. However, when working on optimising business processes with complex rules, the way to achieve those objectives is not always clear-cut.

How can complex business rules combining numerous factors, and potentially frequent changes to how the rules are applied, be summarised simply ? Managing multi-channel pricing, optimising pick-up or delivery rounds, ratifying quality processes in constrained environments, and managing dynamic routing on the basis of external data are all examples of issues that result in business processes frozen because of the effort involved in developing and testing any adjustments.

Making the right choices to simplify complex business rules and processes

Some think that only custom developments can solve their problems (in the form of a few thousand lines of code). However, it would be fanciful to believe that such a solution would then increase the agility of the business.

The long-term upgradeability and maintainability of such development relative to complex business rules will act as a brake on any changes to those rules.

Whereas, to genuinely improve the quality of service for business processes based on the outcome of following complex business rules, it is essential to process them with a complex rules engine and BPM software that is sufficiently configurable and open.

And for good reason: some companies have made changes to their business rules throughout the life of the business, and the result can sometimes be that they have to manage very complex processes, incorporating a great deal of variability (conditions and exceptions), making their modelling and their processing eye-wateringly complicated. Such a situation is described as CEP (Complex Event Processing).

Some best practices in managing complex business rules

The aim of a rules engine is to convert these business rules into computerised processing, while ensuring they are complete, and deducing the resulting truth table.

The following best practices can guide your complex business rules:

• Before applying rules within a process, it is beneficial to simulate them to confirm their completeness (including where they overlap or leave gaps), as well as their application (scope, results, etc.).
• Separating the storage of data from its processing logic is a good idea, making it possible to concentrate on technical skills, improving efficiency and making business rules upgradeable.
• It is better to split rules by area than to group them together, ensuring better reusability of rules and making them more upgradeable.
• Defining application-agnostic operation of processes is a plus point (to avoid manual management of particular cases that are handled inadequately in their original applications, to coordinate processes that involve more than one application, etc.).

Consequently, it is business constraints that need to be extracted in the rules, freeing them from any limitations imposed by applications. The aim is to convert functional users’ business rules into computerised processing.

Managing complex business rules and BPM

While Business Process Management and BRMS (Business Rules Management System) are two different things, they are both connected to the management of data flows and processes.

We know these issues well, and the importance of understanding the challenges surrounding your complex business rules management, to better support and guide you on our different, but very much related, data flow management toolkits.

To meet the challenges of modelling your processes, orchestrating your data traffic, and re-engineering your information system, Blueway offers a comprehensive platform incorporating all aspects of data interchange (BPM, MDM, ESB and API Management).