As the world adapts to the new reality of Covid-19, businesses are being forced to adapt or die. Managing and automating decision making with a rules engine can improve business agility and resilience. Business rules live throughout your organization and dictate how it runs. These protocols also represent the retained knowledge that informs the decisions that lead to the best outcome for your business. This makes rules important assets and the key to smooth operations.
Digitizing these rules not only makes them more accessible throughout the organization but automating them can improve your ability to respond to change. When COVID-19 hit, companies that performed fewer manual tasks and could quickly pivot business processes uniformly across the organization were in a much better position to weather the storm.
Automating business rules and workflows can also help organizations serve customers in ways that may have been too cumbersome via a more manual process. This is particularly important with the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic limiting how physically present employees can execute tasks.
Banks that could renegotiate existing loans and underwrite new Covid-19 relief loans rapidly were in a much better position to capture this new business. Those that relied on manual processes could not scale their operations to meet the spike in demand. Trying to negotiate these loans from a home office makes it even more challenging with manual processes.
As organizations think about how to automate business rules, they must not forget that these rules change often and the pace of change will only accelerate in the future. Any business rule automation strategy must be flexible.
Defining Business Rules and Workflows
Business rules can be thought of as declarative statements of fact, both simple and complex. Rules can produce outcomes ranging from a simple yes/no decision to complex scoring based on multiple criteria. Even more complex rules could involve analyzing data streams in real-time to detect defined events that trigger rules that are nested in another set of rules that dictates a particular action in a broader workflow.
