Using Business Rules To Find New Revenue

By Kevin Foster, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Progress

While the widespread adoption of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a threat to existing on-premise applications and independent software vendor (ISV) business models. It’s also an opportunity for ISVs to step up and meet market needs as there are numerous ways ISVs can work to not only meet those needs, but boost overall revenue.

One method frequently overlooked is leveraging a Business Rules Engine (BRE) to enhance existing business applications or create new ones. In general, BREs are beneficial to ISVs because they help create customized products that appeal to specific markets. They respond to unique customer changes, such as determining pension eligibility for retired workers, reviewing credit loan applications and managing risk assessment, and tailoring insurance policies. Given today’s world is all about the customized experience, now is a great time for ISVs to explore potential revenue opportunities around using BREs. Let’s explore some of those opportunities.

Less Training, More Accuracy
ISVs have limited resources, yet they must meet standards that others don’t. For example, many ISVs in healthcare and government sectors deal with constantly changing regulations. Failure to abide by the latest legislation can have serious repercussions, including financial penalties. As a result, management may decide to invest heavily in training and testing to ensure manual processes are in place for accurate decision-making. However, these paper-based records and manual processes aren’t enough to successfully manage program rules, regulations and requirements. By contrast, automated, structured, rules-driven processes can serve millions of constituents in a timely manner.

By automating operational decisions and web-enabling intelligent citizen and customer interactions through business rules automation, organizations can improve the accuracy and speed of determining and delivering benefits, whether related to health and human services, pensions or licensing. Moreover, they can prevent fraud with automated investigation processes, and perform other daily critical tasks more efficiently.

Reduce IT Overhead
Going a step further, automating operational decisions helps ISVs minimize IT costs, as they can maintain decision logic outside of process and application code. This eliminates the need to implement custom coding requirements; developers can take advantage of codeless configuration and high-performance tuning options to develop more agile connectivity solutions, with less development and troubleshooting time and effort.

Not only does this automation simplify and shorten planning and testing, but IT-related costs once dedicated to development practices can now be relegated to innovation, helping developers uncover additional ways to keep the business nimble, responsive and competitive. Everyone wins: change cycles decrease by up to 90 percent, operational costs shrink and the business becomes more agile.

Expand To New Markets, Faster
For ISVs in the midst of developing a new product, automating business processes means accelerating time to market (at a lower cost), from proof of concept to deployment, because they’re no longer held up by the typical testing roadblocks. Because BREs enable agility and adaptability, organizations once geographically limited because they lacked available resources now have the opportunity to expand into unchartered markets. A localized or niche product can be easily extended or customized to match the needs of customers in alternative markets, simply by applying the necessary logic to the product’s rules.

Flexibility Equals Success
Ultimately, every business in every industry is looking to be more agile, productive and profitable. Realizing those goals means your operations must keep up with the velocity of information and thousands of decisions required to run the business. The key to success is flexibility; a BRE provides the ability to quickly adjust to constant market, customer and regulatory changes, giving you the flexibility you need for long-term success.