The Challenge
As the number of customers have grown, the current approach of expanding custom programs and coding poses a challenge to the reusability and maintainability of these programs. Hence the client is looking for a way to better manage individual customer requirements (i.e. their Business Rules) as they transact documents with the client.
The Solution
With servicing individual customer's needs in mind, the EDI Transformation Project was started to revamp the programs and processes in place, and redefine the look and feel of Business Rule. By introducing the use of TIBCO BusinessEvents (BE) to manage and correlate customer events, the client adopted the approach of centralizing Business Rules to be managed by the client Business Users via a user friendly front end. When a new Business Rule is created or changes made to existing Rules, these artifacts are injected dynamically into the BE Rule Engine without system downtime. The changed Rules will take effect immediately in BE to correlate customer events and take appropriate actions.
the results
The benefits of this approach are multifold:
- Clear separation of roles - the client's Business Users used to rely on developers to make program changes to adopt a new Business Rule. With this new approach Business Users is responsible for Business Rules, create artifacts for them but not the coding of the Rules, while developers support a generic platform to interpret the Rules and they do not need to understand the business aspect of the Rules. This makes support of the solution clear and simple.
- Fast adoption of new Rules - Dynamic injection of new Rules and Rule changes can be done anytime within the control of Business Users, and changes can take effect immediately without any code changes or system downtime.
- Generic framework means the same platform can be reused in many other projects within the client.