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 Decision 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 Decision
Manager
provides the following capabilities:
vocabulary management
A business vocabulary
defines entities and terms. Terms are the building blocks that you
use to construct business rules. SAS Decision 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 Decision 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 Decision 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.
rule set management
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 Decision Manager displays rules sets in decision
tables. Each row of the decision table defines the conditions and
actions for one rule. By using SAS Decision 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 Decision 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 Decision 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.