Define business rules for smoother processes
It's hard to define a business rule simply. We're going to try and do just that in this article! In a nutshell, a business rule is used to shorten decision-making cycles. It is the prerequisite for establishing processes to streamline the organisation and management of your business.
Definition, examples and best practices for managing them without pulling your hair out:
Definition of business rules: what are they?
Business rules, or rules for managing a company, are all the principles which, once applied, do not require a decision to be made. The decision has been taken upstream: it does not need to be validated again each time a similar case arises.
Testable and measurable, the set of business rules therefore serves to frame and limit the actions taken by the business teams so that they follow the company's strategy.
👉 As a result, processes run more smoothly because they are automated, and business teams save time.
If this concept still seems unclear to you, we present a few examples later in this article.
Business rules.
Why describe and use business rules? 5 advantages
Time and performance savings
With business rules defined upstream of projects, there are no decisions to be made during the course of a project: time-consuming exchanges and validation are thus eliminated, saving time for the whole team. Put simply, no more time is wasted "asking questions", because the answers have already been defined.
For business teams, it also means :
- greater clarity about progress and the course to be followed,
- improved performance in the application of business rules, thanks to automation.
In the context of an IT project, for example, these gains are non-negligible when it comes to development!
Reducing project risks
A business principle translated into actions, in computer programming, is inevitably better followed since human intelligence gives way to artificial intelligence to carry out the action. Automation ensures that the rule is respected.
Reduced project management costs
Less time + fewer risks = lower costs! Project managers benefit from greater efficiency in achieving their objectives thanks to the application of management rules.
What's more, defining monitoring rules helps to identify alert thresholds (e.g. deadlines exceeded for certain tasks, late unpaid invoices). This gives you more room for manoeuvre to limit damage... and reduce final costs.
Decorrelation of business and technology
Business logic and IT are not necessarily impermeable, but separating them has the advantage of ensuring that business decisions evolve and are maintained separately from the application code.
In addition, it allows the functional experts, or business experts, to keep the management of the principles to be applied within their own sphere: we benefit from a better distribution of responsibilities within a project.
This limits the risk of a member of the technical team making the wrong decision because he hasn't been given precise enough specifications when a change in business policy occurs, for example. The functional experts are the guarantors of this.
Better process monitoring
If business rules are well defined, processes can be monitored more effectively. But also, identifying a badly-oiled cog in the business rule helps to update processes more quickly.
The most common problem when trying to develop automated processes is knowing how to integrate the business rules so that they correspond to the tasks to be carried out.
Designing rules upstream means that they can be intelligently integrated into processes, freeing them from cluttered processes with superfluous or irrelevant steps, or simply processes that do not meet the needs of business teams.
Business rule: 2 examples to understand
Example 1: price calculation and invoicing
Let's take a simple example. Let's say you run a grocery shop where you sell food and non-food products. You decide to apply an automatic 10% discount to all your student customers, simply on presentation of a student card.
✅ Your business rule is: if my customer is a student, then -10% should be applied to the total invoice.
Then, from a technical point of view, all you have to do is set up your cash register software to automate the price calculation process. So, when you invoice a customer, by specifying their profile, the process is launched, the business rule applied and the discount recorded.
Example 2: benefit offered
You sell IT equipment to professionals. To be competitive in your market, you decide to offer your customers a discount above a certain total invoice amount.
✅ Your business rule is as follows: if the total amount exceeds €1,500, then the hardware installation is free.
In the same way as in the previous example, once your invoicing tool has been set up, the invoicing process includes this business rule and automatically applies the benefit to the invoice.
To find out how to set up an invoice management workflow, take a look at the tutorial in this dedicated article.
5 best practices for simplifying the management of business rules
- Business rules must meet the needs of the stakeholders and business teams concerned: although this best practice may seem obvious, it's always a good idea to bear it in mind when defining your own business rules!
- Your business rules must comply with current regulations: keep abreast of new legal or accounting requirements, for example, as you monitor them, so that your processes don't do you any harm later on.
- Integrate your business rules into your processes using the BPMN 2.0 standard to create a common repository that can be automated and easily communicated between business teams.
- Design business rules as early as the strategic definition phase of a project or programme, at the start of the process and before the business specifications: you eliminate any future need to go back and correct a process.
- Use a BPM tool like Iterop to model your processes by integrating your management rules: the design of processes, but also their execution, will be simplified thanks to a workflow engine.
What are your best practices for managing and making optimum use of your company's business rules?
Article translated from French