harshavardhan.jegadeesan

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    While business rules are everywhere and we well recognize the need for using a business rules management system like the NetWeaver BRM (NW BRM) to create, manage, validate, consume and analyze business rules in business applications, have you ever wondered about common usage patterns for NetWeaver BRM? In this blog, I will detail out the archetypical usage scenarios of NW BRM in customer projects.

    There are 3 archetypical usage scenarios for NW BRM (see below) in customer projects in order of popularity.

     

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    1       NW BRM in Business Processes


    NetWeaver BRM is primarily used for abstracting and supporting decisioning in business processes. This usage pattern is the most common pattern in customer projects. Given that NW BRM is tightly integrated with NetWeaver Business Process Management (NW BPM) both in design time tooling as well the runtime, the use of NW BRM in BPM processes is quite natural. NW BRM also allows business users to edit and manage rules through the web-based Rules Manager, thereby providing control to the business and improving agility and ability to change of business processes.

    Usage of business rules in business processes could be several, from invoking a business rule for calculations, supporting process agility, determining a user or a user group for assigning tasks (human interaction in process), supporting gateway decisioning to determine the course of the process i.e. the process flow, cleansing and transforming process context data, to ensuring regulatory and legal conformance. The table below has some examples:



    1

    Calculations

    frequently changing rules and calculations to be managed by business users

    Calculating credit score for a loan applicant based on credit scoring rules, Calculating liability for a vehicle insurance claim, Bonus calculations for employees etc.

    2

    User, User Group Determination for Tasks

    determination of user or user group for assigning tasks in a human activity

    Determine manager of employee to assign employee leave request

     

     

    3

    Gateway Decisioning in Processes

    Gateway decisioning to determine process flow(or process variant)

    Customer support process for premium customers

     

    4

    Data Transformation and Cleansing

    Data transformation and cleansing rules for process context in MDM scenarios

    Validation of Business Partner data


     

    1.1 Data Transformation and Cleansing Rules in Master Data Governance Scenarios


    Apart from supporting calculations, gateway decisioning etc, NW BRM is heavily used to validate, cleanse and transform master data. NW BPM is frequently used along with NetWeaver Master Data Management (NW MDM) to support workflows involving managing and maintaining master data.

    For example consider the Supplier Onboarding Process of a major mobile handset maker that is owned and managed by the global sourcing department. The process supports identifying global and local suppliers, making contracts with the suppliers and on-boarding the supplier. In this Supplier Onboarding process, NW BRM is used to validate the supplier data to ensure data quality and to model supplier contracts.


     

    2       Rules-intensive applications

    Rules-intensive applications are custom-built, industry-specific applications in sectors such as defense, retail, healthcare, logistics, banking, financial services and public sector, which are extensively dependent on business rules to automate decisions. These applications use NW BRM independent of a business process in NW BPM.

    Consider the example of a large airline logistics company in Europe, a lead logistics provider for the aviation industry. For its Transportation and Logistics application, calculating customs duty for different material parts for different countries is a cumbersome process. The customs duty changes frequently and has to be reflected in the systems as quick as possible. This company used NW BRM to reduce the complexity of managing customs duties for its logistics operations.

    In another case, a financial services and insurance conglomerate uses NW BRM to cross sell health insurance policies to its customers based on a detailed need analysis. NW BRM is also used to calculate risk profiles of customers based on pre-defined rules to de-risk the health insurance business.


     

    3       Distributed Deployment Scenarios

    In more recent and interesting scenarios, customers want to package rules capabilities with their application and offer their applications on sporadically connected devices such as a laptop of a sales person or as a SaaS offering on the public cloud.

    Consider the case of a bank selling financial products like mutual funds, bonds and insurance to its customers through its numerous branches in a country. In order to analyze the needs of the customer and sell the right product, the bank has an “Individual Financial Planning (IFP) application”. This application has business rules to access the financial needs of a customer in order to propose relevant financial products. The IFP application can package rules along with it and deploy it to individual branches or laptops of the field sales person.

    Another case in point is the enforcement of centrally defined customer loyalty rules on Point-of-sale (POS) terminals in retail outlets of a retail chain. The loyalty rules can be deployed and invoked directly on the POS while providing real-time offers or discounts. Such distributed deployment of rules is possible with the Lean Rules Engine (LRE) available since NetWeaver BRM 7.30 release.

     

    In conclusion, the three archetypical scenarios are the predominantly known scenarios from customer projects. While the BPM usage scenario is more common, rule-intensive applications scenario where business rules capability is the fundamental building block of the applications are becoming popular. Distributed deployment scenarios are more recent and there is a lot of interest from customers for the Lean Rules Engine.

    Usage Recommendations - NetWeaver BRM vs. BRFplus

    Customers often ask us this question " Which business rules offering do we use - BRFplus or NetWeaver BRM?" 

    SAP's Business Rules Offerings, both NetWeaver Business Rules Management (NW BRM) and BRFplus get adequate attention and investments within SAP. Having said that, the decision on which rules offering to use for a particular use case is often non-trivial. It is based on the decisioning problem at hand. The choice of rule engine would broadly depend on a combination of the following factors:

    • technology stack (execution environment) of the application
    • the stack in which application data resides
    • Features (such as rete rules and flow rules) required to solve the decisioning problem.

    As a thumb rule, for best performance and integrated rule editing experiences, the recommendation is to use a rule engine that integrates deeply into the execution stack of business applications. Consequently, SAP provides two rule engines that seamlessly integrate with ABAP and Java stacks respectively. For pure ABAP stack use cases, BRFplus shipped with Business Suite 7 is the best suited while NW BRM is best suited for pure Java use cases.

    For example, when a customer wants to leverage business rules in a Suite application or add flexibility to a Suite process, BRFplus would be the ideal choice. For customers creating composite applications and business processes using NetWeaver Composition Environment (NW CE), NW BRM would be the ideal choice.

    However, often times the decision on which rules engine to use go beyond technology stack considerations and hinge on the requirements of a particular use case. We present five usage recommendations (fig 1) which can help in deciding which rule offering to use.

     

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    Figure 1. Usage Recommendations for SAP Business Rules Offerings

     

    On the X-axis we have the rule engines, NW BRM and BRFplus on either sides and on the Y-axis we have the Suite core processes and composite applications (modeled processes) on either side. We have 4 quadrants representing usage recommendations.

     

    Quadrant 1 (Custom developed Suite applications using BRFplus)

    Quadrant 1 characterizes standard use cases where BRFplus is used to solve decisioning problems for custom developed applications, which extend the business suite functionality. Custom developed applications can externalize decisioning logic using BRFplus and improve the flexibility greatly. Since the execution environment and the application data reside on the ABAP stack, BRFplus is the natural fit in such cases.

     

    Quadrant 2 (Custom developed Suite applications using NW BRM)

    Quadrant 2 characterizes use cases where custom developed applications in the suite (read ABAP stack) use NW BRM for managing business rules. In such use cases:

    • Applications often use rete rules or flow rules to solve decisioning problems.
    • Applications interact with other Non-SAP systems in a heterogeneous landscape and the data for decisioning in spread across this landscape.

    When applications in the ABAP stack use NW BRM, it is possible to make the usage transparent by natively connecting to NW BRM by using the BRFplus connector feature in BRFplus.

     

    Quadrant 3 (Composite Applications using NW BRM)

    Quadrant 3 characterizes standard use cases where composites developed using SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (NW CE) use NW BRM natively. NW BRM is closely integrated with BPM and hence modeled business processes use NW BRM to solve decisioning problems.

     

    Quadrant 4 (Composite Applications using BRFplus)

    Quadrant 4 characterizes use cases where composite applications developed using NW CE as well as modeled business processes in BPM use existing business rules in the core suite applications designed using BRFplus. In these use cases, composites leverage existing rules in BRFplus by calling them as web services.

     

    Quadrant 5 (Mixed Usage scenarios with both BRFplus and NW BRM)

    In addition to  "BRFplus only" and "NW BRM only" usage scenarios in the 4 quadrants, we increasingly see the need for mixed usage scenarios in which both BRFplus and NW BRM are used together in heterogeneous environments involving both SAP and non-SAP systems. Several use cases require business rules to be modeled in a "single place" and execute in both BRFplus and BRM within the same scenario.

     

    In conclusion, the five usage recommendations presented here are for specific use case characteristics described above. Most of the customer use cases fit these quadrants. Hence, the five usage recommendations could well serve as a reference plane for making a decision on which SAP business rule offering to use.