Automated decisions have transformed the way businesses function with less human involvement. This enables non-technical team members to spend more time and energy on complex tasks.
Defining Decision Engines
A decision engine runs business rules against input data to make decisions. This tool is designed for critically important operational decisions that must be made immediately, frequently, and correctly.
As a result, decision engines can be configured to automatically make decisions and conclusions without waiting for user input.
Decision-Making Examples
As businesses collect more data from different sources regarding customer preferences, decision engines can help them nurture relationships customer base by displaying personalized products.
Online businesses can set up decision engines as filtering systems. For example, if a website visitor were interested in buying a car online, the website could use a filtering system to ask a sequence of binary questions in order to refine the search results and help the user find the car they need.
Expressing Decisions
Operational decisions can be represented as functions, business rules, and decision tables and trees.
Functions
Functions empower users to deploy any business logic by writing simple code snippets.
Business Rules
Business rules are robust conditional "if-then" statements that instruct business software applications on how they should operate based on particular conditions. In other words, business rules define how a company gets things done by determining what an organization is and isn’t allowed to do.
Rules execute decisions regarding an organization’s pricing, product characteristics, marketing channels, and quality assurance. These are only some of the many decisions business rules make.
Not only do business rules have a crucial role in helping run everyday operations in companies but they also represent laws, best practices, business goals, and regulations.
Decision Tables
A decision table makes decisions based on values stored. in rows and columns.
Essentially, each table holds a list of factors that determine what conditions trigger which rules, including what decisions to make and their consequences.
Decision tables are best fitted for running complex business rules that have multiple conditions. This is because users add conditions merely by including a new row or column.
Decision Trees
Decision trees are merely a visual representation of the decision-making process. A decision tree uses the branching method to demonstrate all the possible results of any decision.
Decision trees are ideal for instances where a particular condition has multiple different results.
How Businesses Use Decision Engines
Companies across industries use decision engines to drastically reduce expenses, and enforce best practices while boosting the customer journey.
Air Travel
Decision engines are typically used in the airline industry to enhance the pricing and sales processes.
For example, automated decision engines can determine the pricing using a wide range of external factors including seat availability, seasonality, and the time of purchase.
Finance
Financial institutions use decision engines to accelerate loan application approvals, which are often time-consuming, repetitive, and rest on consistent criteria. Also, decision engines can spot fraudulent transactions that require instant attention from the fraud department.
Insurance
As is the case with banks and other financial institutions, decision engines help insurance carriers immediately generate quotes for policyholders who enter their personal information online.
Intelligent Decision-Making
A decision-making software that has a business rules engine running under the hood gives non-technical users the ability to make create and manage operational decisions without having to wait for help from the IT department.
As a result, companies of varying sizes across industries use rules-based decision-making to drive growth while remaining compliant with all the relevant regulations.