True-Agility-blog-header

BPM’s Promise Of True Agility, Fulfilled By Business Rules

Business Process Management (BPM) plays a significant role globally in transforming business processes for companies across different verticals. For more than a decade, BPM has been at the center stage of any business process improvement initiative. The key value proposition of BPM includes Efficiency, Agility, Visibility, and Time-to-Market. Today, I am going to talk about Agility and how Business Rules Management System (BRMS) makes it happen.

What is True Agility?

business-agility-via-brms-newAgility means the ability to make quick changes to business processes with minimal or no intervention from IT. In traditional systems, say ERPs, business processes are written in stone, aka code. A simple change, like an additional approval, calls for a Change Order. What follows is a lengthy Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), leading to huge efforts and cost. No wonder several companies made a fortune by customizing ERPs to suit the needs of specific business processes.

BPM, with its model-driven approach minimizes the need for writing code itself, leading to faster changes possible in the process. But, can it be made better? What would be the ideal scenario? An ideal scenario is where business users with appropriate access and authority can make changes on their own without any intervention from IT. That is True Agility. Does BPM deliver True Agility? Well, let’s dive-in deeper.

Not all changes are the same

When I say “changes to a business process”, there are several aspects of a process that can be changed. Each of these aspects have a different implication and a different approach. Changes to workflow vary from changes to User Interface. In a similar manner, so do changes to – approvals, data models, validations, decision model, integration touch point, SLAs, reporting, and so on.

Business rules drive a variety of behaviors of a business processes. For example, a decision to approve an order or not? An SLA could also be driven by business rules. A User Interface validation may have a business rule driving it. A deeper look at the Agility requirement reveals that it’s often the business rule changes that comes disguised as business process changes.

Business Rules Management

Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) provides business users an ability to easily define and maintain complex business rules, including the ability to change them on-the-fly. When your business processes are powered by BRMS, either as a native capability of the underlying BPM platform or as a specialized BRMS platform complementing BPM, most of the changes to business rules are achieved on-the-fly. A capable rules management system takes agility to a whole new level. BRMS’ capability brings True Agility to Business Processes.

And the Lack of it?

So what happens if your business processes are not powered by BRMS – natively by BPM or by specialized BRMS? Process developers mostly end up embedding business rules in expressions and scripts written as part of development of business process on BPM platform. When it comes to changing these business rules, business users don’t have the ability to implement the changes themselves. While the time and effort involved are certainly lesser than traditional system, the changes are not on-the-fly. Changes to rules still involve development-testing-deployment cycles. No – it’s not True Agility!

Princeton Blue has applied its knowledge gained from 8 years of experience working with Appian customers and has created a specialized rule engine ARM.

Princeton Blue’s Advanced Rules Management (ARM)

Designed especially for Appian customers, ARM provides a business friendly user experience to create and maintain decision table rules. ARM is a simple Appian bolt-on that offers business users the ability to define, test, modify, and analyze decision table rules through a simple, intuitive and mobile-enabled User Interface and make changes on-the-fly.

princeton-blues-arm
ARM gives True Agility to Appian customers! Do you want to know how? Click here to learn more about Advanced Rules Management.

appianworld2016banner

Visit us and see a live demo at Booth 18 at AppianWorld 2016 on May 11-13, 2016 at Washington, DC.

We hope our blog helped you understand the benefits of business-friendly and agile Business Rules Management System (BRMS). Use the comment section below to share your thoughts and observations. Do follow Princeton Blue on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Google+ to get updates about BPM and related technologies.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top