Transportation companies, Cargo & Parcel Services are a great example to illustrate the usefulness of using Business Rules in Business & Enterprise Applications.

Transportation companies transport a wide variety of cargo including containers, loose & rolling cargo. The cargo can be consumer goods, agro products, construction materials, steel, automobiles etc.

They use a dizzying array of rules & guidelines to decide their pricing structure for their services. Now, the pricing structure for a Shipping transaction will depend on at least the following factors

1. The Type of the freight service, whether container or rolling
2. Container Size & cargo volume or weight, as applicable
3. Number and type of delivery & pickup points for the cargo
4. Port of origin, destination

The charges themselves will be of many types. Some of them are

1. Freight charges
2. Trucking
3. Handling charges
4. Stamp Duty
5. Taxes (VAT, Service Tax, Stamp Duty)
6. Insurance
7. Fuel Rate Adjustment
8. General Rate Increases

There are many guidelines that will need to be followed to evaluate each of these rates. Let’s look at some sample rules to compute freight charges

Commodity Table

Freight Rates (Effective Start Date: Sep16, 2006)

There are also a large number of scenarios/cases in these kinds of problems. One interesting observation is that most of the rules are in the form of Tables (Decision Tables)

Studying the problem, there are a few points that come up

1. The number of Business Rules is going to be large, complicated
2. The rates are sensitive to market & regulatory changes and therefore will change often. The system should allow very quick changes to these rules
3. Contracts with rates effective as of earlier dates will have to be honored by the system. The system should be able to honor contracts with different effective rates
4. These rates are typically drawn up by Business Personnel. They are used to working with Excel. Capturing these rules in Excel will avoid duplication and reduce manual errors. The system should be able to import the Excel rules/pricing tables directly
5. The system should allow the auditing of these rules to ensure compliance.
6. Visibility into the system, as in what pricing rules are applied should be easily available
7. It must be possible to test these rules independent of the application to improve response times

Business Rules Management Solutions, like QuickRules.NET are designed to solve exactly these kinds of problems. Pricing Rules, Tariff Plans, Fee Calculation etc are best managed by using a Business Rules approach than any other traditional approach.