Managing Business Rules with the Rules Manager

Rules Manager allows rule testing, rule refinement, and end-to-end change management. With Rules Manager, business users can observe and change business policies that are deployed in an application without needing to stop the application. This provides a complete management of the business rules life cycles.

The figure shows the Rules Manager creation screen.

Rules Composer comes with the following features:

• Business user-friendly rich rule formats.
• Support for multiple data models for rules implementation.
• Data model independent business vocabularies.
• High performance rules engine.
• Stateless Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) engine.
• Rete-based inference and sequential engines.

Role-based access can be assigned for BRM entities by using SAP NetWeaver Administrator. Permissions range from read-only to edit. Different access permissions can be given to different entities of a rules project.

The figure shows an example of a decision table in the rules manager.

Integration with Microsoft Excel enables business users to make changes in decision table rules by exporting decision table data to Microsoft Excel, modifying it, and then importing it back into the decision table. Feature parity with the Rules Composer is provided so that business users are able to make changes to values using Microsoft Excel 2007 and upload the changes at runtime.

Rules Manager enables decision tables to be exported to Microsoft Excel for easy editing. After changes are made to the decision table, you can re-import it back into the ruleset.

During versioning, the user is asked to choose between an active or latest version of the product, and will keep working on the chosen version until Change Project or Logoff is chosen. This enables users to work on active or latest versions of rules artifacts and perform changes incrementally without activation.

Rules Manager shows the version history of a rules project. Business users can compare the different versions of rules by added data, modified data, deleted data, If-Then rules, and decision tables. Changes are color coded to easily see the differences in rulesets, rules, and definitions.

Refactoring rules enable users to create complex conditions for rules and then group the conditions logically.

Business users can generate reports of rulesets. The reports contain details regarding the rules; decision tables and other rule elements contained in a ruleset.

Rules Manager allows business users to find usage of a decision table or a definition, making it easier to track the effect of changes.

Rules Manager also provides a consistency checker feature to check syntactic properties of rules and decision tables. The consistency checker can also be used to check for overlapping conditions and missing ranges in decision tables.

The rules Manager offers a very special function: the consistency checker. It allows easy check of the consistency of rules.