Eweek has this article about Mercado Software that will without human intervention add and remove products based on inventory and item profit margins.

I found that interesting because this is a clear use case for business rules technology. I am sure that Mercado internally use some kind of Decisioning mechanism, and I would love to understand what it is.

But, talking about these class of problems,here are some of the usecases that the article mentions.

• If Inventory Level for a Product Goes Below a Threshold (Event), Then Remove the Product from the Catalog
• If Profit Margin for a Product Crosses a Threshod (Event) , Then Promote it to a More Prominent Position in the Catalog. Use a Scoring System to Rank products.
• Find All Products Related to a High Profit Product, and Update their Ranking also.
• Define what Related Products are. Use this Information for Effective Cross Sell.

If you look at the above list closely, you will see that it is a list of decision making directives, also known as business rules. And these are the rules that will change often.

These business rules will drive the automated decision making that are expected here. And, because these are business decisions, and also ones where the business rules might change often, you have an express case for rule externalization here.

These rules cannot & should not be locked up in Code.

The Business Rules Way

If this same scenario is done using Business Rules Technology, this is how you would explain it.

• Capture the rules using a Business Rules Management System. This way your rules are automaticaly externalized from code.
• Whenever a business event happens, get the rule engine to decide what you should do next, based on your current policies.
• For example, when the Inventory System reports that the Inventory Level , put this through the rules engine. The rule, in this case could be that if Level Below 75, then Remove Product. The rule engine applies this rule on the curent catalog, and the product gets removed.
• Because the rules are externalized, and additionally, they are in a english like form, the business can verify and validate the rules before they are deployed to the production system.
• And, capabilites like Approvals, Security, governance concerning rule modification, access are easily managed using commercial Business Rules Management Systems, like QuickRules.NET

Related Reading

1. Complex Event Processing and Business Rules