Business rules capture
the logic of business decisions and are one of the core components
of decision management systems. Business rules make the decision-making
process transparent and adaptable, allowing organizations to respond
quickly to new information about customers and markets. They allow
organizations to identify and deal with fraud, avoid unnecessary risk,
and find opportunities hidden in customer data.
You can use SAS Business Rules Manager to create a database of business rules, connect
those rules together into rules flows,
and publish the
rule flows for use by other
applications. SAS Business Rules Manager provides the following
capabilities:
data management
You can manage your list of data tables from within the
application. You can create new Base
SAS libraries, add and remove tables, view table data and
metadata, create and delete table summaries, and associate attachments and comments with tables.
The application uses these data tables whenever it needs to access data, such as for
rule discovery and
rule flow testing.
A business vocabulary defines entities and terms. Terms are the building blocks that
you use to construct
business rules. SAS Business Rules Manager enables
you to easily create and edit entities and terms. For individual terms,
you can create a list of allowable values, which makes creating rules
even easier.
business rule authoring
A business rule specifies
conditions to be evaluated and action to be taken if those conditions
are satisfied. For example, you can create a rule that determines
whether a customer has a mortgage. That same rule can then add the
outstanding balance of the mortgage to a running total of the customer’s
debt. With SAS Business Rules Manager, you define the conditions and actions for each
rule. You can use the
Equation Editor to create the expressions for the rule.
The rule authoring
features of SAS Business Rules Manager make creating rules easier
and more accurate. For example, the list of allowable values for a
term help avoid incorrect rules. The lists of allowable values can
be updated as needed, and the lists do not prevent you from providing
new values manually.
A rule set is a logical collection of rules. A single rule set can have many rules.
For example,
you might have a rule set that determines a customer’s asset balance and another rule
set that determines a customer’s debt level. SAS Business Rules Manager displays rules
sets in
decision tables. Each row of the
decision table defines the conditions and actions for one rule. By using SAS Business Rules Manager,
you can easily create new
rule sets, reorder the rules in a rule set, add new rules to existing rule sets, and more.
You can also manage rule sets and rule flows. When a rule set or rule flow is published,
the versioning features of SAS Business Rules Manager create
a static version of the rule set or rule flow. This
static version helps you to enforce integrity and governance over
the rule sets and rule flows that are put into production.
rule flow authoring and publishing
A rule flow is a logical collection of rule sets. A rule flow defines a set of rule
sets and the order in which they will be executed.
A single rule flow frequently corresponds to a single decision. For example, a rule
flow can initially
execute the rule set that determines a customer’s asset balance. Next, the rule set that
determine a customer’s
debt level is executed. Finally, the rule set that assign’s a customer’s loan application
status is executed.
SAS Business Rules Manager makes it easy to combine rules sets into a rule flow and
to publish those rule flows to the
metadata server. After a rule flow has been published, it is available for use by other applications.