CHALLENGE

Benefits administration is complex. Thousands of business rules and decisions are made every day to determine tax/contribution rates, validate transactions, compute benefits, process claims, and manage exceptions. If these rules were set in stone, managing them would not be so difficult. However, business rules are always in flux, placing strains on your systems, processes, and employees.

SOLUTION

To better accommodate rapid changes in business policies and rules, while lowering software implementation and support costs, companies need solutions that contains a business rules engine that documents, tests, and automates business rules.

Typically, these rules engines are part of low-code development platforms (LCDPs) – a software that provides an environment coders use to create applications through graphical user interfaces and not actual code.

Sagitec’s benefits administration solutions,  housed inside an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called S3 delivers a configurable, easy to manage, rules-driven solution to manage this above flux. Sagitec provides a user-friendly graphical interface based rules engine that enables client staff to easily add and modify business policies through configurable rules, without the need for expensive and time-consuming technical and programming support. The rules engine allows you to:

• Create business rules without coding logic in the application
• Increase efficiency and gain business agility
• Keep pace with dynamic markets and customer needs.

This rules engine is used for easy modeling, analyzing, documenting, testing, and storing business rules as executable rule services.  Rule authors (e.g., business analysts, power users, or technical analysts) model and maintain business rules — without programming—by using a drag-and-drop graphical interface to create ‘if-then-else’ expressions for designing powerful logical rules and decision tables. 

• Rules can be designed quickly without programming
• Rules can be independently tested
• Rules sets can be compared against other rule sets for performing impact analysis
• Rules can be bound to the benefits administration solution through simple object mapping and binding
• Rules can be deployed with very small development footprint
• Rules can be maintained without programming

FEATURES

Graphical illustrations

As mentioned above, subject matter experts and business analysts can graphically model business rules, decisions, and policies and need not know to program. The visual modeling approach ascertains a shared understanding and shortens the time to market for new versions of your business rules. Rules are designed in simple visual flow chart or decision tables like models without programming and dramatically improves the understanding of project requirement.

Flexibility

The business can gain self-sufficiency in the maintenance of their business rules and decisions. They can consistently put rules into production, independent from IT release cycles. This way, companies can increase flexibility and handle the short change cycles that are demanded by the business

Traceability

Rules record all activities when creating, changing, or executing business rules in a detailed and auditable way. Audit trails ensure traceability and execution statistics provide clarity about which rule model was used and which path was taken through the rule model.

Scalability

Rules are built for enterprise applications with scalability to support and secure highly complex projects.

BENEFITS

Reduce your lines of code

The use of programming language is replaced with logical rules and decision tables which lets you develop logic without knowledge of complex coding. Rules are optimized for using declarative rules based on a decision table with a fixed value. After drafting rules, business analysts can insert expressions based on formula computations into rules by modeling the business logic (if-then-else).

Ability to maintain versions

Sagitec understands that business logic consists of both business policy and business rules and that there will be frequent changes to both. In the past, it was difficult, if not impossible, for a business analyst or developer to add or modify policy because it was hidden behind complex software code. As a modern, easy-to-maintain solution, Sagitec’s solution separates business rules from application code. This allows business analysts to create, change, model, design, test, and deploy business rules to, for example:

• Quickly establish special program parameters and accommodate changes such as federal and state extensions.
• Efficiently carry out tasks such as adding a new benefit program or changing monetary calculations (MBA and WBA).

This capability enables you to immediately respond to legislative changes and unforeseen events, and policies are applied consistently and accurately. Modification of business rules by your staff without programming and technical support can save days to weeks of time it would otherwise take to implement policy and law changes.

 Sagitec provides an easy to access version-controlled rules repository, preserving business logic so that it is reusable. This improves policy management and testing by providing a graphical way to add and modify the business policy.

Trace rule execution for comprehensive auditability

A powerful facility for business analysts to test rules (flow and expression) before rules are deployed. Test values are supplied by the business analyst and stored within the tools. Before deployment, business rules need to be bound to the solution's Business Objects and re-tested. This requires knowledge of the Entity Model, but not programming. Developers will need to add minimal C# to call the rule from within the solution.

CONCLUSION

With these features and benefits, having a robust rules engine not only helps you in business processes that require updates due to legislative changes, such as annual contribution rates, COLA eligibility, and percentages, or benefit program additions or changes but also provides flexibility and ease of updating your processes.

Click the link below to find out more about Sagitec's low code development platforms.