Business Rule engine auto generating Product Configuration Rules
Requirement: Currently Product releases requires 2 IT and 2 QA resources for product build and test. The business wants to own and control these product releases. Siebel provides a product UI and configuration rule engine to allow non-IT business users to create the business rules.
Problem: After some analysis the conclusion was that while it was possible to build all these rules and the UI it was time consuming and would require about two resources working full time to build and maintain these products in Siebel. It took about 3-5 man days to build and unit test the products.
Solution: After exploring alternative ways that this could be done in Siebel, the conclusion was to leverage the Siebel Product Configurator but to build a rule builder that allowed the business to enter the business rules and have the application translate and create configuration rules. This involved creation of User Interface templates with preset defaults which were then used for building the UI, taking out a repetitive task and automating it. Similarly the Rule builder guided the users to define the rules in a natural language form. These rules were global and based on conditions and could apply to all or specific products. When a product structure was ready to be build the user would click a button and all the User interface elements and applicable rules were applied and configuration rules automatically generated. This will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to build and test products. The rule engine supports 26 different business rules. The rules are categorized and organized in ways that the business is familiar with. The rule engine is flexible and can be extended for new kinds of rules. The rule engine supported both product selection based rules as well as rules based on quote data. The only ongoing maintenance was to enter master data for any new products which could be done as part of the product creation process.