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By Peter Coy, President, Prodigm Inc.
"Business Rules" is a buzzword that needs to be understood in order to maximize the efficiency and flexibility of your marketing and sales process. So what is a business rule? It’s a set of logic that defines how to react to a situation that occurs during the course of doing business. Some business rules become human procedures, others can be embedded into programmed logic so that they are automatically executed when a situation occurs. The Automatic business rules are the focus of this article.
Fundamentally a rule says "when this happens, under these conditions, do this". The trick is to make this kind of rule setting both comprehensive and flexible without getting into major complexity. Business rules are forever being amended or extended as new situations occur. The design of a business rule is simplest if it can be limited to one, or only a few situations. In designing a system, the way that business rules are identified and the language in which they are developed, are both critical to reducing costs and increasing flexibility. All business rules should be isolated from other code and kept in a business rules library. The rules in the library should be carefully documented and cross-referenced so that system designers, programmers and end users can review them easily and re-use them without duplication. Rules are often associated with events, it makes sense to identify which events should use which rules.
Defining business rules is an early part of system design. Often the business rules require data such as product profiles or customer profile information to support them. For example, you may wish to sell one product that has a requirement to collect information relating to the prospect being a smoker. Other products may have age limits. Some products may only be sold in certain provinces. Each of these attributes of the product can be stored in the product profile and referred to from the business rules. Business rules can require certain fields to be input for certain products while skipping those fields for other products. The rules can change process flow and streamline operations, since otherwise all products have to follow the same procedure.
Business rules can be described by a logic building system in some CRM operations, in others a readable, compilable business rule scripting language is used. The main requirement is readability, it is essential that business rules can be easily understood by the end users, so that they can confirm that the automated system is doing what they expect. If you have already developed a system where the business rules are embedded in code all over the place, it is a very useful project to extract and review the rules. Misunderstanding the existing business rules can often thwart new product introductions.
In summary, business rules describe how your system will react. Direct marketing and sales systems need a lot of business rules flexibility otherwise system costs spiral and users become frustrated.
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