On March 27, 2020, U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in response to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. State Workforce Agencies (SWAs) across the nation scrambled to develop technical solutions to accommodate millions of Americans suddenly eligible for unemployment benefits. Throughout the pandemic, rules, policies, regulations, and legislation were—and remain—fluid and evolving and SWAs are interpreting and implementing federal and state changes constantly. 

Using Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform Xelence, some SWAs overcame “rapid-fire change” by empowering application developers to pivot and continuously update/build systems that kept pace with these changes. Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform Xelence features a Rules Engine that provides the capabilities for high-frequency changes in business rules, validations, and functionality. Our Rules Engine allowed SWAs to respond to changes in a matter of a few days, rather than weeks or months, as and when changes needed to happen.  

Sagitec’s Rules Engine can model, analyze, document, test, and store business rules as an executable rule service. This means analysts and developers can write business rules using a simple flowchart approach, write test cases to test them before deploying it to production - effectively increasing accuracy and efficiency, and paying claimants on-time.

Sagitec’s objective in providing the Rules Engine feature within Xelence, our low-code/no-code platform is to make the process of adding, removing, and changing business rules in sophisticated and large applications less complicated and faster. Application developers using Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform report our Rules Engine:

• Speeds up the development lifecycle, allows more resources to be involved in business rule development and reduces the dependency on senior-level developers
• Makes business rules easier to read, write, understand, follow, and test the workflow and business logic for business SMEs and new team members than traditional coding
• Significantly reduces lines of code, making rules easier to maintain and improving system performance
• Executes without running the application to allow testing and validation to happen at the time of development
• Simplifies business rules testing, including visually identifying which step failed through traceability and debugging.
• Allows business rules to be tested independent of the web application testing
• Provides decision tables to help see all scenarios and flows
• Allows for easy verification and decision logging based on user inputs while testing
• Provides business rule reusability within and across projects

What made the implementation of the CARES Act so challenging was the need to set up systems quickly that could process unemployment benefits for new and changing business rules and system validations around these questions:

• Which claimants are eligible for what type of benefit or combination of benefits?
• How to calculate the benefit amount for claimants in various employment situations?
• How is program funding disbursed to unemployed Americans?
• How to identify and detect fraudulent claims?

Using Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform Xelence, application developers serving SWAs implemented entire benefit systems within a 3-week software development lifecycle and continue to manage new and ongoing changes in rules effectively.

Our Rules Engine supports low-code development methodologies. It is a drag-and-drop, user-friendly, graphical interface. For more advanced developers who find coding more familiar or don’t want to use the graphical interface, we provide a rules-language (Neo#), similar to C#. Neo# also provides the path to migrate business rules from existing C# code into Sagitec’s Platform Rules Engine.

Our Rules Engine is just one feature of Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform Xelence that enables swift and painless enterprise application development. Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform helps application developers support complex organizations to build enterprise-grade applications with ease.

Do you want to know more about Sagitec’s low-code/no-code platform? Read more here or contact us for more information.