Define business rules for smoother processes
It's hard to define a business rule simply. We'll try to do just that in this article! In a nutshell, a business rule is used to shorten decision-making cycles. It's the prerequisite for establishing processes to streamline the organization 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 are all those principles which, once applied, do not require a decision to be made. The decision has been taken upstream: it doesn't need to be validated anew each time a similar case arises.
Testable and measurable, the set of business rules thus serves to frame and limit the actions taken by business teams so that they follow the company's strategy.
👉 As a result, processes are smoother, because they are automated, and they save time for business teams.
If you're still unclear about this concept, we'll give you 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 a project, there are no decisions to be made during the course of a project: time-consuming exchanges and validations are thus eliminated, saving time for the whole team. Simply put, no more time is wasted "asking questions", because the answers have already been defined.
For business teams, it also means :
- greater clarity on 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!
Reduced project risks
A business principle translated into actions, in computer programming, is necessarily 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! By applying management rules, project managers benefit from greater efficiency in achieving their objectives.
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 leeway 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 remain separate 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 bosom: 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 or she hasn't been given precise enough specifications when business policy changes, for example. 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 poorly-oiled cog in the business rule helps to update processes more quickly.
The most common problem when developing automated processes is how to integrate business rules to match the tasks to be performed.
Designing rules upstream enables them to be intelligently integrated into processes, freeing them from cluttered processes, with superfluous or irrelevant steps, or which simply don't meet the needs of business teams.
Business rule: 2 examples to understand
Example 1: pricing and invoicing
Let's take a simple example. Let's say you run a grocery store where you sell both 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% must be applied to the total invoice.
Then, from a technical point of view, all you need 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 computer equipment to professionals. To be competitive in your market, you decide to offer a benefit to your customers 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 billing tool has been set up, the billing process includes this business rule and automatically applies the benefit to the invoice.
To understand how to set up an invoice management workflow, discover a tutorial in this dedicated article.
5 best practices for simplifying business rule management
- Business rules must meet the needs of the stakeholders and business teams concerned: if this best practice seems obvious, it's always a good idea to keep 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, in your monitoring, so that your processes don't harm you 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 program, at the start of the process and before business specifications: you eliminate any future need to go back and correct a process.
- Use a BPM tool like Iterop to model your processes, integrating your business rules: not only will process design be simplified, but so will their execution, thanks to a workflow engine.
What are your best practices for optimal management and use of your company's business rules?
Article translated from French