HRF vs BRFplus for Public Sector

What is HRF and how is it different from BRFplus?

HANA Rules Framework (HRF) supports developers to easily add real-time decision making capabilities to HANA applications, and empowers business users to define and manage business rules in dynamic scenarios. HRF rounds out SAP’s Decision Service Management and Business Rules Management offerings by providing development, deployment and management options on HANA infrastructure. HRF runs natively within HANA and ESP (optional) without any external footprint.

As the native rules framework for HANA, HRF benefits from the capabilities of the HANA platform, including:

• Rapid development – SAP HANA Studio editors for developing rules-based applications.
• Business empowerment – SAP Fiori UX and natural Rule Expression Language for modelling rules.
• Scalability and performance – A single framework for operating on big data in real time.

HRF is therefore ideally suited to business scenarios that require real time processing of large datasets, controlled by business users. A perfect example from the Public Sector is Fraud Management, where compliance experts are operating across millions of customer/claim records to identify potential risks in real time.

HRF is not currently suited to business scenarios that involve complex rules logic, such as eligibility and entitlement determination. SAP Decision Service Management (DSM) with BRFplus is more suited to these scenarios because BRFplus has more computational power (close to 20 expressions including Formulas, Table Operations, Boolean, etc), compared to HRF (2 Expressions – Text Rule and Decision Table). Also, BRFplus can operate on uncommitted data.

As of 31 October 2015, with the release of SAP NW 7.50, HRF is integrated with DSM and BRFplus. Now SAP DSM can be used to author rules in both BRFplus and HRF. HRF rules need to be deployed to the respective HANA databases which will generate the required stored procedures. This is similar to rules written in BRFplus, which generate ABAP code upon deployment to the respective ABAP systems.