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Business process automation made easy with Java, Part 1

Implement business rule engines in a J2EE enterprise

By Ahmed Abulsorour and Siva Visveswaran, JavaWorld.com, 09/06/02

These days, severe market demands drive enterprises to reduce costs and increase shareholder value. In such an environment, businesses can realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows, eliminating nonvalue-adding human interventions, and allowing enterprise applications to communicate and intelligently and seamlessly share information. In this two-part series, we present the technology building blocks for automating an enterprise, how those blocks fit within an enterprise component architecture such as J2EE, and how you can design and build a business rule engine solution based on this architecture.

We begin by explaining business process automation components, then introduce existing J2EE-based (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) rules engines, and conclude by explaining how rule engines fit within an enterprise architecture.

Read the whole series, "Business Process Automation Made Easy with Java:"

• Part 1: Implement business rule engines in a J2EE enterprise
• Part 2: Design options for rule engine integration

What is business process automation?

We define business process automation as technology components substituting and/or supplementing manual processes to manage information flow within an organization to lower costs, reduce risk, and increase consistency. For example, Figure 1 illustrates a generic risk-assessment business process inherent in most financial applications such as mortgage preprocessing, claims processing, underwriting, and so on.

Figure 1. Manual risk-assessment process

Such a manual risk-assessment process can lead to problems such as:

• Laborious data entry/re-entry
• Manual risk assessment that potentially varies from field to field
• No analytical data to validate past decisions (for improvements)
• Long turnaround times

Added up, such problems can make manual risk assessment an expensive process.

Figure 2 illustrates the same process in an automated environment.

Figure 2. Automated risk-assessment process

Clearly, the transformed environment can significantly lower costs by eliminating manual data re-entry, shortening decision cycles via automated risk assessment, centralizing decision making, and lowering risk due to the analytical input.

Technology building blocks of a business process automation solution

Automation can deliver benefits only with a combination of process re-engineering, enabling technology, and an organizational structure that can support both. We believe the following four key technology building blocks are mandatory for an automated enterprise:

• Business rule engine: Business rules describe the structure, operation, and strategy of an organization's business process. A few key people in the organization enforce business rules, typically captured in policy and procedure manuals, customer contracts, supplier agreements, and so on. That manual decision making proves error-prone and inconsistent. In legacy environments that support business processes, rules encoded inside the application can be expensive or difficult to change. A business rule engine lets you separate application code from business rules, maintain rules in a central/shareable repository, and promote consistent decision making. Such an engine proves central to any automation solution.
• Application integration platform: Automation implies that manual processes will make way for system processes, which in turn implies that the systems that help realize a business process can seamlessly communicate and exchange information without manual intervention. That requirement calls for a strong application-integration platform that supports multiple communication protocols and data semantics between systems.
• Workflow engine: In typical business scenarios, including the risk management example we saw earlier, automation needs some manual processes on an exception basis. For example, if a rule engine cannot establish the credit worthiness of an applicant based on the rules defined in its repository, someone must take a second look. Workflow engines enable a smooth hand-off between systems, between people, and between systems and people.
• Common data interchange standards: To lower costs through automation over the long term, enterprises need a common, XML-based data interchange standard that reduces development and maintenance efforts.

In this article, we focus on a J2EE-centric automation solution built around the business rule engine component.

 

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