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Follow the subject of Business Process Management (BPM) for a while and you will be told repeatedly that BPM delivers considerable competitive advantage, especially in terms of cost, agility and efficiency. This is true, but it does so to a far greater degree today than ever before. Developments in technology, the worldwide adoption of the Internet, and changes in business culture and practices resulting from competition, regulation and economic conditions have contributed to the advancement of BPM.
“BPM software deals with defining, directing and tracking processes, while BRMS software focuses on defining, maintaining and executing decision logic used at specific points within a process or as part of a decision service within a business system.”
- Jean-Francois Abramatic
- Director, ILOG Products at IBM
Of tremendous significance has been the advent of the Business Rule Management System (BRMS). BRMS complements BPM by providing practical, cost-effective automated decision making in a broad range of applications. More important, BRMS simplifies the development, deployment and reusability of decisioning elements, and empowers business decision makers to implement their decisions directly.
Time-to-Market Barrier
BPM software defines, orchestrates and monitors long-running processes comprised of people- and system-based activities. This sounds applicable to virtually every industry we know. And it is: Manufacturing, finance, insurance, government, retail, health care, communications — wherever a process is in place for directing business activities, BPM can make an important contribution toward boosting profitability and return on investment.
A hurdle for BPM, however, has been putting business decisions to work fast enough to make a difference. A simple example can be a loan origination system. A decision could be made to change the rates used by the system and the conditions for applying them. Lost already is the time taken to make the decision. Meetings had to be held, research conducted, the market impact analyzed and so forth, to formulate and pass the decision. Now that the decision has been made, it has to go into effect.
Traditionally, set steps have to be followed to change such an advanced system. The decision needs to be defined in terms that developers can use in updating the system, and the system has to be analyzed to determine where changes need to be made to implement the decision. The work has to be described, budgeted, scheduled and finally implemented, and then the revised system put into operation — and the inevitable problems addressed as they arise.
With a good BRMS, this doesn’t happen. The loan origination system stays intact, while the decision is implemented peripherally. The new rates and conditions are captured in business rules that are stored in a central rule repository and typically applied by the system automatically when needed. And with the right access, the decision makers can even go into the repository to add or change rules, or at the very least, contribute through direct collaboration with business users and IT. The loan origination system stays active throughout, with no downtime or changes to its proven code. What may have taken weeks is now cut down to days ― and even hours in many cases!
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