I was reading the Cadillac Story in Business Week, and I thought this was such a good usecase for explaining the power of the Business Rules Technology & approach.

Here is the gist of the story for those in a hurry! Excerpt from Business Week.

Car companies have for years kept goodwill funds for dealers to draw on in such situations. But until about a year ago, Cadillac, No.3 on our list, had rigid rules that made dealers jump through hoops to get at those funds. Dealers had to call a regional representative at parent company General Motors Corp. for permission to do work free of charge outside of warranty.

This article details how Cadillac adjusted their working rules and policies to give their dealers the authority to deliver a more satisfactory experience to the customers.

I wonder what kind of system Cadillac uses to operationalize this initiative. However, this case highlights why your business policies need to be managed and improved, tweaked or even discarded to give way to newer ones.

Here are some of the important points that we should note in this case.

1. Car companies provide an Annual goodwill fund that their dealers can use
2. Dealers must use this fund proactively, but carefully and in a consistent fashion to deliver best possible and intended service to their customers
3. Dealers use this fund to provide services like loaner cars, post warranty service etc.
4. Car companies cannot control the funds too much as this will raise decision making times too much. NO customer will be willing to understand delays or non-availability of service
5. But fund usage and service delivery must be consistent across all dealerships.
6. Corporate policies must be uniformly enforced, and wherever human judgement is required, the corporate policies must be enforced

Now, the real problem is setting up a system that will enforce these business rules. Here are some classifications of the business rules that I can think of immediately

1. Customer Eligibility Rules - Is the customer eligible for the service that will utilize the aforesaid goodwill funds.
2. Pricing Rules - How to determine how much funds to spend on this customer and in what fashion?
3. Warranty Claims Rules - Should the dealer deal with the serviceable part of should he pass it on to the Car Company
4. Compliance & Dealer Ranking Rules - Verify if the dealers are compliant with their funds utilization and rank dealers based on their performance

If you see, Customer Eligibility & Pricing Rules are dealer side rules, Warranty claims rules apply both on the dealer and the car company’s side, and the compliance rules are used only at the car company’s site.

All these rules are fairly volatile rules and in my opinion require a high degree of visibility. Thus the case for managing these rules effectively. And of course, you can manage them only if they are externalized using a BRMS because these rules will be fairly complex and numerous in number.

Another Point to note is that is that the Customer Eligibility & Pricing Rules & Warranty Rules will typically be specified/deployed from the car company and might have local dealer level overrides. And typically dealers are small establishments with no IT teams. This means these business rules must be available in a form that non-technical staff should be able to view, modify and manage by themselves.

I must emphasize that such a level of business policy and decision management is what Business Rules Management Systems deliver. Business Rules and how they ease operational decision automation and policy management is something I continuously focus on this blog.

The benefits of managing these business policies and the decisions that they drive should be obvious. Happy Customers, Happy dealers and Happy Car Companies

On a related note, you should probably look at this case where I discuss how business rules technology can help ease Warranty Claims Management Woes