Faster Time to Market with Greater Business Control

Today business systems implement policies which may have hundreds or even thousands of individual guidelines. Each of these guidelines results in endless streams of incoming data creating problems with the flow of control. Traditional procedural languages, including those used in web applications, cannot meet this challenge in a flexible and timely manner.

The traditional approach means that full requirements documentation and technical specifications need to be completed before any User Interface (UI) development can begin. Since all the business and application behavior rules must be implemented in code, the project requires many resources and an extensive timeline.

Traditional Timeline - No Business Rules Engine

Above is an example of the original project plan for a Haley customer. The decision to utilize Haley's business rules management system ultimately paid huge dividends on this project.

Time and effort saving using a Business Rules Engine for multi-threaded development

By removing layers of programming, business rules management systems can shorten change cycle times, lower costs for developing and implementing changes, and increase the consistency with which business logic is applied.

With a multi-threaded approach flexibility is enhanced as organization will be able to define components that can be built independently, or even outsourced. Additionally, the development of the user interface will be straight forward, since the behavior logic and rules will be independent of the UI. Most importantly, by keeping the business knowledge centralized and work segmented, communication breakdowns can be avoided and virtually eliminated throughout entire project.

The approach using a business rules engine allows work to occur in three parallel streams. The work efforts can be easily managed, but still need a modified waterfall approach. However, the business requirements, rules and application behavior still need to be fully and accurately defined prior to rules implementation. The quality and completeness of the requirement drives the application release schedule.

In the Haley customer example, they were able to project a saving of 2 months (about 20%) by using implementing a business rules engine into the development project. At this point the customer had not discovered Haley; however upon discovering Haley's unique business rules management solution they were able to almost double the development time saved.

Natural Language Business Rules Management System Maximizes efficiency

With Haley's natural language rules management system, documentation and implementation occur simultaneously resulting in the shortest possible release window.

By utilizing Haley rules implemented in the natural language eliminate time and errors. Additionally, by authoring business rules in the natural language organizations can experience a substantial reduction in validation time and business user effort. The Haley customer was able to cut the development time by almost 40% because of Haley's unique ability to review the actual rules, not just a design document or technical specification.

Another main difference organizations using Haley's business rules approach is that rules documentation and implementation will occur simultaneously, virtually eliminating the need for waterfall-type requirements gathering. Work threads that were not rules dependent could be expedited.

The customer example above illustrates how the Haley customer was able to achieve a 40% cut in development time by utilizing Haley's natural language rules management solution over a traditional business rules approach. The customer benefited not only by being able to release the product 3.5 months before the planned project rollout but also by maximizing flexibility and accommodating of change throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Post production benefits

The benefit of using a natural language BRMS do not end with the initial project cycle, but carry through product support and operations. With a natural language BRMS, rules can be added/changed within minutes, directly in the natural language. This can virtually eliminate the need to change requests or enhancement specifications. The internal approval process means rules are written directly by the business team, and reviewed, tested and deployed with-out having to pass documentation around for approval only to have to renter and translate to code. Since regression testing happens during this process, there is no need for a separate process.

The business ultimately benefits through greater business velocity and agility. Rules, product, and rate updates occur when necessary, as opposed to a rigid develop length cycle that may only have release a fixed points during the year.

Additionally, in the Haley business rules approach all rules are centralized in a single central repository, and stored in natural language for easy review and capture of the businesses valuable corporate knowledge. The use of natural language rules also improves compliance and auditing and provides a very agile rules platform for responding to sudden environmental factors and most importantly ensures your business is firmly in control of the systems, and not the other way around.