Business Process Rules addresses the need for improved efficiency and increased flexibility of business processes of an enterprise. This, integrated with Business Process Management Systems, can manage the complexity and change of business processes in an enterprise seamlessly. They promote operational agility, better responsiveness, and greater flexibility and increased ROI for an enterprise.

This article presents Business Process Rules, Business Process Rules Engine, the advantages, the benefits of integrating Business Process Rules Engine into the Business Process Management Systems and highlights how these cater to the increasing demand for automation of business processes in an enterprise; making these business processes more flexible and adaptable for future changes.

The Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) defines a business process as "A set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realize a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organizational structure defining functional roles and relationships." A business process is actually, "a recipe for achieving a commercial result. Each business process has inputs, method and outputs. The inputs are a pre-requisite that must be in place before the method can be put into practice. When the method is applied to the inputs then certain outputs will be created."

A Business Process Management System is one that enables us to define, automate, execute, manage and improve business process in an enterprise. Find more on Business Process, Business Process Management and Business Process Management Systems in my article at the following link: Business Process Management: Bridging the Gap between Business and IT.

When we model a business process, rules are created and associated with the business process itself. These are commonly known as Business Process Rules. These are statements that govern the overall functioning of the application’s business processes. They are defined by the business people, can change frequently over time and are declarative. They define the policies and procedures that govern how the business process of an application would behave. Business Process Rules enhance productivity and promote business process agility and its adaptability for future changes. According to the Business Rules Group, “a business rule is a statement that defines and constraints some business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. The business rules which concern the project are atomic, that is, they cannot be broken down further.” 

The traditional business applications have their business processes and business process rules embedded in the application’s code itself. Hence, any change in the business rule would compel the developer to change the application’s source code to facilitate these changes. If we need to change the application’s business process rules owing to a change in the business process of the application, it would be time consuming, error prone, critical and at the same time tedious to change the application’s code, once again to facilitate these business process changes.

This is where a Business Process Rules based approach comes in. A Business Process Rules based approach is a paradigm shift from the traditional way (embedding the business rules in the application’s code) of dealing with business rules in an application. A Business Process Rules based approach promotes isolation of the business rules of an application from its code and, hence, promotes greater flexibility and adaptability for future changes by reducing the downtime for implementing the changes to its business logic. “It is a development methodology where the business rules are in a form that is used by, but does not have to be embedded in, business process management systems.”

This business process rules based approach has a lot of advantages.

·         Ability to change the business process rules independent of the business process of an application

·         Reduces cost, risk and development time of an application

·         Promotes agility, flexibility, manageability and adaptability of the business processes

·         The rules can be shared across processes and outside processes by storing them in a centralized shared repository

A Business Rules Engine is one that executes and manages the Business Rules. A typical business user is responsible for modeling the business rules and the enterprise software architect would be responsible for mapping and integrating the same into the application.

The advantages of using BREs are given below:

·         Providing a centralized Business Rules repository that can be shared by multiple applications

·         Automation of the Business Rules of an application

·         Promoting business process agility

Typically, a Business Rules Engine (BRE) consists of the following components:

1.    Rules Editor: Used to design, validate and simulate the business rules based on some predefined conditions using a user interface.

2.    Rules Repository: Used to store the business rules in a centralized repository so that multiple applications can have access to these rules.

3.    Rules Engine: Used to execute the business rules designed using the Rules Editor. These rules are read from the centralized rules repository.

4.    Rules Administration Component: Used to administer the business rules, modify them and update the business rules repository if the business process changes. Generally, the Rules Administrator is a web editor used for remote administration of these business rules.

In contrast to the traditional business applications, a Business Rules Engine facilitates the implementation of agile and adaptive Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) by promoting an isolation of the business rules of an application from the application’s code. Hence, at a later point in time, if we intend to modify the business rules, the applications logic would perform as usual without having to rewrite or change the application’s source code.

Business Process Rules can be integrated with the Business Process Editors that are used to design the Business Process Diagrams. The Business Process Engine would execute the Business Processes and the Business Process Rules Engine would read the business process rules (that form a part of the business processes and are attached to them) from the rules repository and execute them. Integrating the Business Process Rules Engine (BRE) with a Business Process Management System (BPMS) promotes better process automation and improves the agility of the BPMS as a whole. In sharp contrast, in the traditional applications, the business rules based on which the application’s business logic would function are embedded in the application’s code itself and are much less flexible and adaptable for changes.

Business Rules Approach

European Business Rules Conference

Business Process Management: Bridging the Gap between Business and IT

Business Process Rules specify the manner in which the business process of an application would function. They form a part of the core business logic of the applications and are important, if not critical, for an enterprise to facilitate agility in their business processes; enabling them to be adaptive for future changes. Applications today should be flexible and adaptive to business process changes. This can only be ensured by adhering to a declarative approach in the modeling of business processes. Business Rules are now being used widely for their capability to make the business processes agile and transparent. The isolation of the Business Rules from the application’s code using Business Rules Engine is the key to greater flexibility and better adaptability for future changes in the Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). This article has discussed Business Process Rules and its applicability in designing flexible, agile systems.