What is a BRMS?

A business rule management system (BRMS) enables organisational policies – and the operational decisions associated with those policies – to be defined, deployed, monitored and maintained separately from core application code. By externalising business rules and providing tools to manage them, a BRMS allows business experts to define and maintain the decisions that guide systems behavior, reducing the amount of time and effort required to update production systems, and increasing the organisation’s ability to respond to changes in the business environment.

BRMS solutions automate policies in custom and composite business applications. They lower application maintenance costs, facilitate more accurate and consistent business policy implementation across applications, and improve collaboration between your business and IT departments.

A business rule engine (BRE) is a component of a BRMS, allowing disparate systems to invoke rule execution and determining the proper “firing” of rules based on the context of the request. Rules engines can combine data with rules to determine a result (decision), which is then passed back to the system that made the request. When rules technology first became commercialised, the products were focused on the execution engine and the algorithms that rules engines used to determine which rules are applicable and in which order should they be evaluated for a given request. Over time, products added tools and capabilities allowing business users to be involved in managing rules, including the ability to test the business impact of changes to rules. It is with these improvements, that rules engines went from being stand-alone products to components within a BRMS.

If your organisation is experiencing any of the following situations, you have an opportunity to benefit by implementing a BRMS.

1. Frequent changes to business systems that require immediate attention and response. Such changes might include:

• Evolving business conditions, such as changes by competitors or in the economic environment.
• New regulations, procedures and/or policies.
• New organisational priorities and market opportunities.

2. Highly variable decisions that need to be automated in order to support your organisation’s business model and product/service offerings. Such variability might include:

• Locality-specific decisions, such as eligibility verification or pricing.
• Customer-specific decisions, such as sales authorisation, priority assignment or contract-related provisions.
• Product-specific decisions, such as configuration and availability.
• Process-specific decisions, such as workflow routing, approvals and straight-through processing.

Managers responsible for policy making in decision-rich enterprises have benefited enormously from information technology. But as the pace of change has increased, and the reach of automation has been extended, traditional software applications have been unable to deliver the flexibility and agility required by most businesses.

WebSphere ILOG BRMS products add flexibility and performance to your business systems, whatever the challenge. Our tools include the functionality to support rule definition, deployment, maintenance and retirement, with specific environments for technical and non-technical users who participate in rule management. WebSphere ILOG BRMS treats business rules as a corporate asset by enabling effective and efficient management of your business rules through their lifecycle.

Key benefits:

• Take rule editing into your own hands
  With WebSphere ILOG BRMS, policies and practices are expressed as natural language-based business rules instead of computer code. Developers, analysts, managers and administrators use powerful editing tools to manage, track and change rules.

• Build consistency into your systems
  WebSphere ILOG BRMS stores rules in a central repository. The same rules can be accessed across the enterprise, across touch points and applications. Teams employ consistent regulations and practices, ensuring that systems follow compliance requirements.

• Automate precise, highly variable decisions
  In many transactions, the best decision is specific to the context of the geography, customer, product or process (or to a combination of these factors). WebSphere ILOG BRMS allows decision logic to be defined in a variety of text and graphical formats, and for inter-related rules to combined together to define complex and variable decisions. This ensures that automation can be increased and that the decisions made by business systems are more precise and personalised than can be implemented through traditional programming approaches.

• Easy, safe and predictable rule management
  With WebSphere ILOG BRMS, you get comprehensive capabilities for managing rule changes, including role-based management authority, testing and simulation, configurable queries and reports. This ensures your rules are updated more quickly and accurately – business analysts and experts can change decision logic themselves, relieving overworked IT departments. At the same time, ILOG provides tools and environments that allow IT and Operations to manage the deployment and monitoring of rules into the production environment.

• Download solution brief: Five Ways to Fast ROI with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) (US)