In the last 4 years I have been working in the BRMS / DMS (Business Rule Management System / Decision Management System) domain as a product owner in HANA Rules Framework. During these years I have experienced and encountered a lot of different and interesting use-cases of rules utilization which I would like to share with you in this post.
So first of all - lets have a quick glance at the current segmentation of solutions/projects running with HRF:
What we are learning here is that the majority of solutions/projects currently utilizing HRF are from the Marketing, Supply Chain and IT domains.
I will give here some samples of rules (HRF) usage from each domain:
Marketing:
- Rules are used to score leads for a better leads' management (based on the calculated scores).
- Rules are used to determine marketing offers for consumers from different channels based on different attributes of the consumer and/or the offers.
Supply Chain:
- Rules are used to plan and allocate transportation resources (such as containers, railroad cars etc.).
- Rules are used to prioritize customers' demands based on different customers' attributes.
IT:
- Rules are used to verify data integrity and quality of DB tables and data sets.
- Rules are used in different decision points of a BPM (Business Process Management) process.
If we are looking on the segmentation of HRF's leads (some of them are already projects in process) - the picture is a bit different:
Here we can see that also Finance, Service and Sales are quite prominent domains for usage of rules. So here are some samples of rules usage from these domains:Finance:- Rules are used to normalize financial data from different legacy system into the same format in order to have a consolidated reporting.
- Rules are used to verify that end users have entered to a registration form all mandatory anti money laundering (AML) fields.
Service:
- Rules are used to predict which machines have high potential for failure, based on the stream of measurements from the machines (IoT).
- Rules are used to check whether a maintenance jobs are done in the correct way.
- Rules are used to prioritize a queue of customers' requests and assign them to relevant experts.
Sales:
- Rules are used to calculate availability of items for different channels from different sources.
- Rules are used to calculate prices of items for different customers based on different criteria sets.
We have some other interesting use-cases which are from other domains or are industry specific, such as:
- Rules are used to check whether patients get the correct treatments.
- Rules are used to customize spent reports according to different customers' needs.
- Rules are used to calculate the qualification (KPIs) of different organizational units.
The bottom line is that rules may be relevant everywhere - we can see here that every LoB (and industry) has valid use-cases for rule management capabilities. Furthermore, we (and also some established analysts) believe that the massive movement of applications towards the cloud, which naturally requires them to be flexible and to support customization in a scalable way (i.e. without coding and with very short cycles), makes BRMS/DMS technologies (such as HRF/DSM/BRFplus) an essential and prominent part of the development landscape more than ever.
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