When you hear the term “business rules,” what comes to mind?  Some examples would be constraints in a query, a data mapping, a data quality constraint, a data transformation, a model or an algebraic equation. It can also be a policy that must be enforced as part of a business process. For example, if a  customer’s net worth reaches a certain dollar figure, he or she would get reclassified as a top-tier customer by a bank.

SAS Business Rules Manager can be applied in all the areas above. It can be executed in batch or called via web services. In fact, the name of the product gives you a pretty good idea of what this product does – helps you manage business rules.

Business rules are a common requirement for many organizations, including existing SAS customers. Here are several of the scenarios where business rules management is useful:

• A data scientist wants to design a study or data model – and rapidly test it for feasibility.
• Self-service, rules-driven analytics built to support agile development, deployment and refinement of analytics research or model building.
• A self-service tool allows you to author rules to establish the inclusion and exclusion criteria.
• The need to re-use rules via a centralized rules repository along with business driven refinement and deployment of rules.
• Staff needs to view result datasets details for reason of inclusion/exclusion/action for further analysis.
• You want to modernize SAS code with “If then else” logic or transformation logic.
• The desire to take advantage of – and modernize – SQL-based rules.
• An organization wants to modernize and automate business processes

Adding business rules support is key for a variety of areas. SAS, although relatively new to the decision management space, is focused on operationalizing analytics for the entire enterprise. SAS Business Rules Manager is available standalone or as part of a Decision Management suite.  Also, remember that business rules take on many forms, and SAS coders have been incorporating business rules since 1976.

SAS Business Rules Manager is typically used by our customers mainly in batch processes. However, we are being asked to integrate into an existing business process via web services. Users are also being asked to incorporate text analytics, which allows the derivation of more information when the data fields are not readily available or do not contribute to the business rule logic.  Pertinent information can be contained in comment text fields, so pulling out key words and using them in business rules only enriches the rule itself for decision-making.

In big data environments, there may also be a need to run business rules in-database (in Hadoop, Teradata and others), which allows big data to be useful at the “enterprise level.” Future capabilities will allow you to discover rules from modeling efforts. What business rules challenges do you have – and how are you meeting them?