SAP Business Rules Management (SAP BRM) enables organizations to automate decisions by using business rules. Business users participate in and control rule definition, while business process experts model, validate, deploy, update, and archive business rules through their lifecycle. As such, IT organizations can work with business users to manage business rules that drive process flow and execution.
Business rules describe the operation, definition, and constraints on the behavior of a business and enables decision automation. Business rules represent the core business logic of each organization and guide and control the basic business processes that form the back bone of any business transaction.
The figure shows the three components of BRM:
Rules Composer
Rules Manager
Rules Engine
SAP BRM provides the following:
- Rules Composer
The Rules Composer is integrated into SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio as a separate perspective. It is a user-friendly interface that enables you to create rich rule formats It supports multiple data models for rules implementation and business vocabulary independent of the data model. Rules Composer provides validation of business rules, testing and refinement of rules based on test results and report generation for rule results. It contains extensive business rules modeling capabilities for business analyst and rules implementation functionality for business rules developers.
- Rules Manager
Rules Manager is a rule-centric application, based on SAP's Web Dynpro technology that provides a rule management environment. Rules versioning, repository service, permissions, access control and rules governance can be managed through the rules manager. Like Rules Composer, Rules Manager can validate, test, refine and generate reports for rules. It allows business managers, administrators, functional users to modify business rules and effect changes in real time.
- Rules Engine
The Rules Engine is a high-performance, stateless EJB Engine. It includes Rete-based inference and sequential engines.
Note
Rete is a pattern matching algorithm for implementing rule-based systems.