I have been a long time believer in needing Business Rules Management as an essential component in enterprise HRMS.

I was visiting this large customer of ours last week who are trying to automate some of their HR decisions using QuickRules. This is a large company with 12,000 employees worldwide, and growing. They keep on acquiring new businesses, while also spinning off new companies. They also employ a large number of consultants with a wide variety of salary and wage structures.

Two of the areas that they are looking to business rules management for help are

1. Employee allowance calculation rules
2. Employee Stock Option computation rules
3. To emphasize, the above two are a part of compensation management.

If you see, they have a large number of allowance types across the globe. They use a single worldwide HRMS across all their offices worldwide. One of the main problems as articulated by the business managers there was one of visibility.

Their policies are all hidden away from their view by monstrous complex software systems, and the business managers and their army of analysts are entirely at the mercy of the IT teams.

New changes take longer and longer to put in, and policy implementation gets more and more complex and hence very buggy because the business rules are rarely understood entirely by the IT teams.

Another serious issue is that their rules are scattered across their very large HRMS, and most of the knowledge about how their system is really working is now lost. So, they are employing their developer army to read through each line of code in the hope that they will understand how their HRMS run the lives of their employees.

Globalization offers its unique challenges as well. How in the world would you ensure that the global and country specific HR policies get applied in the correct fashion as designed by the HR Managers. How would a analyst/business manager ensure that the HR system is actually implementing policies that they want, instead of getting rudely shocked by bugs and buggy patches.

There is only one way in this world to get the Business/Functional analysts to start participating seriously into how enterprise software systems, including HRMS, make critical business decisions, and that is using Business Rules Management technology.

Some of the DSL crowd may cry that DSL’s are equally applicable, but as far as I can see, DSL’s offer a subset of the capability offered by BRMS, and certainly not enough to be able to capture all the kinds of rules that BRMS like QuickRules and QuickRules.NET provide out of the box.

One other customer of QuickRules is using QuickRules to automate how the salaries, allowances of their consultants are computed. I had written about Intelligent Timecard Systems earlier.

Other areas where Business Rules apply in HR Systems are Performance evaluations and appraisals.