Business rules are the workhorse of many enterprise solutions. They are commonly expressed using conditional statements, such as: “If-Then”, or “When this, do this". Popular examples include displaying relevant recommendations to customers online, dynamically adjusting prices, and fighting against fraudulent financial transactions.
Business Rules Benefits
Managing mission-critical processes is infinitely more time-consuming, burdensome, and open to error without rules.
Business rules instruct various business software solutions that steer different business processes by laying out criteria that must be respected. Therefore, these powerful conditional statements express an organization's goals and outline how tasks need to be executed.
For instance, financial institutions examine an applicant's pertinent data such as assets, credit history, revenue streams, and debts when determining whether to approve a loan. Those candidates that don’t meet the required specifications are automatically rejected.
Business Rules in Different Industries
Making decisions manually is very ineffective, error-prone, and is associated with higher operational costs, all of which typically result in delayed projects.
Automated Underwriting
Business rules help optimize the entire underwriting process by performing precise risk assessments in a fraction of the time a human underwriter would need.
If an applicant meets all of the eligibility requirements outlined by business rules, then the application is approved or passed on to an underwriter for quick approval.
For instance, if a potential policyholder is under 40 years of age, is healthy, and does annual medical checkups, then they are eligible for insurance at the lowest rates.
Simple cases are finished in minutes, which allows the underwriting team to focus on more nuanced applications.
Fraud Protection
In order to fight against fraudulent transactions, financial institutions and insurance companies often use rules-based automation software that can spot suspicious transactions and claims.
Banks rely on business rules to activate authentication steps. For instance, if large international credit card transactions are made, this alerts the organization’s fraud department to get in touch with the client to approve the transactions.
Contact Center Optimization
Intelligent and effective call routing isn’t only applicable to purchase orders or sales contracts, but rather it also plays a critical role in customer service.
Callers often become frustrated when they’re required to repeat themselves multiple times on customer service calls. Luckily, contact centers that use business rules allow customer service representatives to deliver a seamless customer experience.
A business rule that routes customer service calls to the agent or department based on the nature of the issue is very easy to generate and manage. For instance, when a caller is having technical problems, then they are automatically connected to the tech support department.
Rules-Based Management Systems
A business rules engine is a robust piece of software solution that allows companies to automatically execute business rules.
Historically, automating processes required programming business rules straight into workflows, which made it impossible to make timely changes to products.
This is due to the fact that programmers were needed to make even the slightest adjustments.
However, with rules engines, non-technical subject matter experts can shorten the deployment time of complex digital products to mere minutes while carrying out smart automation.