Managing Business Rules is Simple with Sagitec's Enterprise Platform Xelence

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. 

Sagitec's enterprise 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.  

The 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 is to make the process of adding, removing, and changing business rules in sophisticated and large applications less complicated and faster. Application developers using the Xelence 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?

With the help of Sagitec, SWAs implemented entire benefit systems within a 3-week software development lifecycle and continue to manage new and ongoing changes in rules effectively.

The rules engine also is a drag-and-drop, user-friendly, graphical interface for more visual developers.