Why choose a business rule engine?

Why ultimately choose a business rule engine to automate your decision-making instead of more traditional methods? The main purpose of a business rule engine is to ensure consistency, efficiency and compliance within business processes. This can be broken down into four core areas: consistency, efficiency, governance and agility.

1. Consistency

Business rules ensure that decisions are consistent, regardless of who makes them or where they are applied. This is especially important in large organisations where multiple teams work with the same processes.

Automating decisions ensures that fewer mistakes are made. This is especially true when rules are complex and changeable. If your organisation's rules change, you can communicate this via emails and documents on internal networks.

However, experience shows that this documentation is rarely read. In addition, it requires your team to implement the new rules in their work. People do a lot on autopilot. Changes to rules are therefore sometimes forgotten or overlooked. And ultimately, people simply make mistakes. For example, because they are tired, distracted or confused.

In addition, conscious or unconscious biases and preferences can influence people's decision-making. By automating decision-making, you eliminate the possibility of judgements being influenced by differences in interpretation and other factors that should not be involved in the business rules.

Consistent decision-making reduces your risk, but also ensures a better customer experience. Especially when the business rule engine also determines the work processes and workflows, a business rule engine ensures that every touchpoint consistently meets the same criteria.

2. Efficiency in processes

Business rule engines eliminate the need for manual checks and ensure automated decisions. This makes processes faster and more efficient. Because you manage the business rules centrally, you can also make changes to those processes centrally. This saves a huge amount of time compared to decentralised organisation of those rules and process steps.

With a business rule engine, you can also automate decisions and process steps that would otherwise have to be done by people. This results in enormous efficiency gains.

By reducing the margin of error, which we discussed briefly in the section on consistency, you also increase the efficiency of your organisation. Making fewer mistakes means less time wasted on correcting those mistakes.

This also significantly reduces the time spent on repairs and direct costs for compensation. The time you previously spent correcting errors can now be invested in developing new business or increasing customer satisfaction in other areas. The focus of human involvement can shift from routine decisions to more strategic or social tasks.

3. Governance

Governance is the set of structures, processes and mechanisms by which an organisation is managed, controlled and held accountable. A business rule engine enables you to centrally manage compliance with laws, rules and internal policies. With an engine such as Rulecube, you can then apply these directly to your work processes and customer interactions.

Setting up good governance is closely related to the aforementioned consistency in decision-making. Leaving decisions – to a greater or lesser extent – to human judgement can more easily lead to discrimination and other forms of non-compliant behaviour. Errors in business rules that have a discriminatory effect can be centrally identified and remedied.

Not only is centralised organisation important in governance, but also the verifiability of the business rules that are applied. Transparency of the rules that will be applied in the future and the rules that were in force at the time that a decision was made is important in preventing legal conflicts and ambiguity.

A well-designed business rule engine reduces the risk of non-compliance with regulations and improves audit and compliance processes.

4. Agility

Business rule engines make it easier to quickly adapt processes to changes, such as new legislation, market conditions or business objectives. They form a central location where all business rules come together. If a rule needs to be changed, this can be done in one place in the business rule engine. All processes and systems connected to it will then immediately work with the new rules — as briefly mentioned under heading 3 on governance.

This prevents departments or employees from making decisions based on outdated legislation, rules or policies. You reduce the risk of errors and work consistently across the organisation in accordance with the current rules.

Because the business rule engine is separate from your IT systems, but still connected to them, you can change rules without having to make technical changes to all your systems. So you don't have to wait for IT specialists or make changes in multiple systems. This makes your organisation way more flexible.

A business rule engine also offers economies of scale. By automating decisions and managing them centrally, you can scale up more quickly — which is useful in times of staff shortages. After all, an automated decision is much easier to scale up than a human one.
Finally, this separation also provides more flexibility when upgrading systems. You can replace systems without the risk of accidentally applying different rules.

In short, a business rule engine gives your organisation greater consistency, efficiency, governance and agility. Your decisions are predictable and consistent, and you make fewer mistakes. You can grow more easily and maintain your lead in a changing market.

If you would like to see what your organisation can gain from a business rule engine, make an appointment for a personal demo now using the button below.