Some examples include assigning an account manager to a new client, determining how to address a customer complaint, and deciding which positions to fill.

While managers and employees can handle these decisions, they can quickly become bottlenecks if certain decisions aren’t made on time. 

Even simple things like making calculation errors and forgetting to fill in a product code create unnecessary delays since these mistakes must be corrected.

This is where business rules come in — a way to automate decision-making and reduce the risk of errors.

In this article, we’ll look at what business rules are and how they work. We’ll also provide examples of business rules that you can create using business process automation software.

Click the links below to navigate to the section you want to learn more about:

• What Are Business Rules?
• 10 Examples of Business Rules
  1. Conditionally Routing Documents
  2. Auto-Populating Fields in a Form
  3. Applying Customer Discounts
  4. Creating Dynamic Picklist Options
  5. Routing Customer Service Tickets
  6. Assigning Company Assets
  7. Performing Calculations Automatically
  8. Validating Data Fields
  9. Requiring Signatures
  10. Showing or Hiding Sections

What Are Business Rules?

Business rules are a set of instructions that determine how a process is performed. They guide decision-making by establishing rules that everyone must follow when carrying out certain activities.

Companies frequently apply business rules to approvals. 

As an example, consider the loan application process. Lenders look at specific criteria like income, credit history, and outstanding debts to determine which loans to approve. 

Applications that don’t meet certain criteria are automatically rejected. Establishing these rules and communicating them in advance ensures that employees apply them uniformly to every application.

Similarly, you want employees to follow a consistent set of instructions whether they’re onboarding a new customer, creating a purchase order, or preparing a sales contract.

The easiest way to get started with business rules is to create checklists. Then employees can simply pull up the right checklist and check off each item as they complete a task.

While checklists can certainly work, a better way to implement business rules is to use a business rules engine – usually as part of a software platform. For example, a workflow engine will usually embed a rules engine that lets you add conditional logic to your workflows, making your organization more efficient.

Managers waste time when they have to send forms back because of missing information. With a workflow engine, you can digitize your forms and make fields like product codes a requirement. You can even pull in data from a database to cut down on data entry.

This is just one example. Now let’s look at other ways you can apply business rules to your workflows.

10 Examples of Business Rules

Processes can become slow and inefficient when manual decision-making is involved. This can result in more errors, higher operation costs, and even delayed business projects.

With business process automation software like frevvo, you can implement rule-based logic into your processes and streamline operations.

Here are some examples of business rules that you can create in frevvo.

1. Conditionally Routing Documents

Companies may require multiple rounds of approval for documents like purchase orders.

An employee creates a PO and submits it to their manager for review. The PO is then routed to a senior executive for further review before it’s handed off to the finance department for final processing.

These steps can work for companies in their early stages. But having a senior executive review every single PO can quickly become a bottleneck as a company expands its operations.

To speed up the purchase order process, an example of a business rule you can implement is to route POs to a senior executive if they exceed a certain value (e.g., above $10,000 or more).

Here’s an example of a purchase order workflow with conditional routing:

If a manager approves a PO that’s less than $10,000, it automatically routes to the finance department skipping the VP approval step. You can also apply similar rules to other forms like invoices and sales contracts.

Another business rule example is to dynamically route approvals to the right manager. For example, if Joe submits a time off request form, it should route the form to his manager and not to just any manager.

2. Auto-Populating Fields in a Form

Digital forms are certainly an improvement over paper forms. But filling them out is still tedious and prone to errors — an employee may input the wrong data, leave a field blank, or make a typo.

These mistakes can create further delays. A manager (assuming they notice the error) would have to send the form back for corrections and review it again.

With the Visual Rule Builder in frevvo, you can create forms that auto-populate fields based on which user is logged in.

Here’s an example of how this looks:

In the example above, the user’s personal information is auto-filled from an internal system, e.g. Active Directory while another field (“Manager ID”) automatically populates with the user id of their specific manager. 

By adding these business rules to your forms, you can greatly cut down on manual and duplicate data entry. 

3. Applying Customer Discounts

Offering discounts can incentivize clients to spend more. However, employees may apply these discounts differently (or not at all) if they’re not clearly documented.

With a workflow engine, you can set business rules that apply discounts to invoices that exceed a certain value. An example might be, “Apply a 2% discount if a client spends over $10,000.”

The benefit here is that the discount is automatically calculated and applied, saving employees from yet another time-consuming step.

4. Creating Dynamic Picklist Options

Most forms have static picklists (dropdown menus), meaning those options are predefined and can’t be changed. 

But what if you want to create a dynamic picklist? 

It would allow you to pull the most recent data into your forms. You can use dynamic picklists to manage time off requests and make it easier for employees to take leave.

The time off request form below has a dynamic picklist that’s connected to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets.

When “Bobby Jones” selects his name from the picklist, the form shows the number of vacation days that he has available.

Click here to try out the time off request form above yourself. 

Other uses for dynamic picklists include displaying a list of products for sales orders, displaying a list of projects for timesheets, and more.

Dynamic picklists can also depend on one another. For example, pick a car brand from the first picklist and a second picklist narrows to display just the list of models for that brand. 

5. Routing Customer Service Tickets

25% of consumers say that repeating themselves is one of the most common frustrations when dealing with customer service.

Implementing business rules can help you deliver better customer experiences. 

For example, you can create a dynamic form and implement a rule that routes support tickets to the right department based on a selection.

Someone from the support team can note down the details of an issue and route it to the appropriate department (e.g., billing, sales, technical support, etc.). Customers can receive a notification letting them know when their issue has been resolved.

When you can quickly resolve issues (and not have customers repeat themselves), your customers are more likely to have a positive impression of your company. This can help increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

6. Assigning Company Assets 

Providing a good onboarding experience is key to engaging new hires. 

Equally important is ensuring that they have the equipment they need for their jobs. However, it can be difficult to keep track of equipment like phones and computers depending on the size of your company.

You can create a business rule to assign equipment based on a new hire’s role (e.g., mobile devices for salespeople in the field and high-end desktops for graphic designers). 

You can also set up rules to grant credentials to the appropriate software (e.g., Adobe Photoshop for designers). When an employee comes in on their first day, everything will already be set up for them, and they won’t have to wait around.

Using business rules is helpful for offboarding employees too. 

While companies try to retain their employees, some may quit their jobs to take opportunities elsewhere or for personal reasons. If an employee leaves, you’ll need to recover all equipment and revoke credentials to prevent continued access to sensitive data.

You can set up rules to notify the I.T. department that an employee has left and to remotely disable their device and revoke access to any internal systems.

7. Performing Calculations Automatically

Another common use case for business rules is for calculations.

When an employee prepares a document like an invoice, they’ll have to calculate subtotals and totals. But performing these calculations manually (even with a calculator) can be prone to errors.

If you don’t catch these mistakes, you risk overpaying or underpaying invoices. Even spreadsheets are susceptible to errors, as you might input the wrong values or forget a zero.

Implementing business rules into your forms to perform calculations can greatly reduce manual data entry and minimize errors.

Consider a purchase order that contains products with different quantities and values. With the Visual Rule Builder, you can create rules that automatically calculate row subtotals and a grand total.

Here’s an example of how these business rule look:

And here’s what the form looks like with the calculation rule above:

Of course, you can combine calculation rules with other rules to make your workflows even more efficient. For example, you can add a dynamic picklist to your purchase order forms and prefill pricing information based on the selection.

8. Validating Data Fields

Consider a common scenario: an employee fills out a form but either enters the wrong data or uses an incorrect format. In these cases, a manager would have to send the form back for corrections and review it again.

To prevent these kinds of mistakes, you can add rules to your form controls that validate the data. For example, an Email field validates that a user has entered a valid email address.

If a user is entering their Social Security Number (for onboarding forms), you can also use rules to specify formats and ensure the data fits those requirements.

Here’s an example of how this validation rule looks:

In the example above, the rule displays a message notifying the user about their error so they can fix it. It’s a simple yet effective way to prevent simple errors that can slow down a process.

9. Requiring Signatures

Documents like purchase orders, sales contracts, and time off requests generally require signatures from the appropriate approvers before they’re processed.

But collecting these signatures can be tedious, especially for paper-based forms — an employee would have to chase down their manager and follow up.

To eliminate the hassle of chasing down signatures, you can add signature fields to your form and make them required.

frevvo makes it very easy to create legally binding electronic signatures for authenticated users. You can also add a signature control that allows any user to sign electronically using their mouse or finger on a mobile device.

Here’s an example of a form with a signature field:

77% of businesses say that e-signatures are a critical requirement for supporting business resilience. As more work takes place outside the office, collecting digital signatures can help you streamline approvals. 

10. Showing or Hiding Sections

Some forms may require additional sections based on certain inputs.

A common example is if a user’s shipping address is different from their billing address. Instead of showing both sections, you can use rules to show the shipping address section if the user says they’re different.

Here’s an example of how this business rule looks: 

If both addresses are the same, then the shipping address section will be hidden.

Other ways to use this business rule include showing or hiding text fields with detailed guidance, approval sections on a workflow step, and more.

Conclusion

Business rules allow you to apply specific instructions to your processes, thus increasing efficiency, minimizing errors, and automating decision-making.

With frevvo’s business process automation software, you can implement a range of business rules to your workflows — conditionally route documents, auto-populate fields, create dynamic picklists, and much more.
Click here for a free 30-day trial to get started with business rules.

The post 10 Examples of Business Rules That Make Work More Efficient appeared first on frevvo Blog.

But having employees perform tasks their own way on more critical activities can affect project outcomes and lead to inconsistent customer experiences.

So how can you set expectations and ensure consistent results across your organization?

Implementing business rules is a good place to start.

This article will look at what business rules are and how implementing them can change how you work. We’ll also look at how you can incorporate business rules into your workflows to make them more efficient.

Click the links below to jump ahead:

• What Are Business Rules?
• What Are the Benefits of Business Rules?
• How to Implement Business Rules Into an Automated Workflow
• 7 Examples of Business Rules

What Are Business Rules?

Business rules are a set of instructions that determine how specific processes are performed. They provide guidelines on critical activities and help ensure compliance with company policies.

Employees having a lack of clarity or understanding of their roles is more common than you may think. Nearly 50% of employees across all sectors lack role clarity in the workplace.

Using business rules across your organization can help employees understand their roles and what they need to do to carry out certain tasks.

You can write these rules down in a handbook for employees or automate them using workflow automation software. The software often includes a business rules engine that guides decision-making based on preset rules.

Let’s say you want to automatically approve purchase requests that are below $5,000 but require approval from a manager above that amount.

With a workflow engine, you can create a business rule based on the example above and implement it in your approval process for purchase orders to automate this decision-making.

Here’s an example of a purchase order with a business rule:

Workflow routing is just one example of how you can apply business rules.

Other examples include using rules for data entry. For example, you can make certain fields on a form required depending on which department is filling them out.

Later in this article, we’ll take a closer look at how you can use workflow software to implement business rules. For now, let’s look at why you should use them in your organization.

What Are the Benefits of Business Rules?

It’s not uncommon for a business to make decisions on the fly in its early years. But taking this approach isn’t practical in the long term.

Organizations that want to scale their operations without sacrificing efficiency must implement automation technology like business rules. 

Here’s why.

Increases Efficiency

Unwritten rules create a lack of clarity, which affects efficiency. 

Imagine you assign similar tasks to a group of new hires. Without clear guidelines and rules, your new hires will likely complete the task to a different standard. Some may even waste time figuring out how to perform a certain step.

Business rules make your workflows more efficient, especially when you use business process automation software to automate them.

Take document routing as an example. 

Chasing down signatures to get a document approved is time-consuming. By applying business rules to document routing, you can make approvals more efficient.

Improves Consistency

Many organizations have rules that are informal or undocumented. 

For example, a manager may offer discounts to customers who spend a certain amount. It’s a common strategy that retailers use to boost sales and increase loyalty.

However, if this rule isn’t documented, employees are likely to apply the discount differently — some customers may receive a discount, while others may not. This can lead to inconsistent customer experiences and even hurt your brand.

Applying business rules to a process can improve consistency. They ensure that employees uniformly carry out certain tasks once specific criteria are met.

Ensures Compliance

Ensuring compliance with company policies is difficult without well-defined rules.

Consider the expense approval process, which allows employees to claim back any costs they’ve personally incurred on behalf of their employer.

However, one challenge that finance teams face is maintaining compliance. Only 27% of companies have a system that automatically flags out-of-policy expenses.

Employees may include out-of-policy items (or forget to attach receipts) when submitting expense claims, which can lead to financial losses if the errors are not caught.

Ensuring compliance can prove challenging, and mistakes are bound to occur if there are volumes of expense claims to process.

Finance departments try to improve compliance by including a list of items that are covered and placeholders with detailed instructions for submitting expense claims. But, this is a manual and error-prone approach.

A business rules engine can enforce compliance so that ineligible expense items are automatically rejected and claims cannot be submitted without the proper receipts.

Streamlines Decision Making

Companies make hundreds of decisions on a daily basis. Implementing business rules can help streamline these decisions.

For example, let’s say your company assigns customer support tickets to certain representatives based on specific criteria. While an employee can make these decisions, you can use business rules to automatically assign those tickets.

74% of business leaders and employees believe that parts of their jobs can be automated. 

By leveraging business rules to automate decisions like routing, you can speed up certain processes and free up employees for higher-value work.

With the benefits of business rules described above, it’s no surprise that 93% of business decision-makers plan to incorporate automation across more areas of their organization.

Let’s look at how you can get started with business rules in the next section.

How to Implement Business Rules Into an Automated Workflow

The easiest way to implement business rules is to write them down in a handbook. But their application relies on every individual reading them and following through. 

Inevitably, different individuals will interpret the instructions differently. It’s almost impossible to obtain consistency and uniformity with this type of manual approach.

Using workflow automation software like frevvo can help your company enforce business rules in a consistent manner thereby streamlining operations. Here’s how to get started.

1. Pick a Workflow

Business rules are more effective when you apply them to workflows that employees perform on a regular basis.

Start with a workflow that follows a repeatable set of steps (with clear start and endpoints). It should also accomplish a specific objective for your company and be performed reasonably often.

Here are some example workflows you can apply business rules to:

• Employee onboarding
• Purchase orders
• Contract approvals
• Invoice approvals
• Expense claims
• Travel requests
• Time-off requests
• Timesheet approvals

Your company may have dozens or even hundreds of workflows. 

To avoid becoming overwhelmed, simply choose one to start with. You can also narrow down your list by choosing a workflow that generates a high return on investment (ROI) when completed.

2. Create a Workflow Diagram

Once you’ve picked a workflow, the next step is to understand how it works today.

What is the exact sequence of steps? Who’s involved in each step, and what decisions do they need to make? Do employees need any tools or resources?

Walk through the exact workflow yourself and get input from those who are directly involved.

Use the information you’ve gathered to create a workflow diagram — a graphical model that lets you visualize each step of a workflow from start to finish.

Here’s an example of a workflow diagram for invoice approvals:

Creating a workflow diagram is useful because it helps you identify where you can add business rules to your workflows.

3. Add Your Business Rules

The next step is to add your business rules.

Let’s say you want to make invoice approvals more efficient. Senior executives are currently reviewing each invoice, but this policy is slowing approvals down.

To speed things up, one business rule you can create is to route invoices to a senior executive only if their value is $10,000 or more.

frevvo’s Visual Rule Builder walks you through the following steps when adding a rule to your workflows:

There’s no coding required, so even non-technical users can create their own business rules.

Here’s what our new invoice approval workflow looks like with a business rule: 

Invoices below $10,000 are automatically routed to the finance department for payment.

This is just one example of a business rule you can add to a workflow. Here are others that you can create with the Visual Rules Builder:

• Validate that the data in a field fits the requirement (e.g., valid email addresses)
• Make additional fields required depending on which department is filling them out
• Populate fields with data based on certain selections
• Show/hide form controls like buttons and text areas 
• Automatically and consistently apply discounts (e.g., depending on region)
• Ensure all required information is provided before allowing the workflow to advance to the next step

Adding these and other rules to your workflows can help your company improve efficiency, minimize errors, and speed up approvals.

4. Test Your Workflow

Leaving out a key step in a workflow can delay work and cause confusion. That’s why it’s important to run a few tests before you deploy a new workflow. 

In frevvo, you can test your workflow right from the workflow designer. You can even preview how the dynamic forms you create will look on mobile devices.

Here’s an example of a mobile preview for invoice approval forms:

Run through the test to make sure everything is working properly. It’s also a good idea to get feedback from your team, as they’ll likely have valuable insights to share. When users have a chance to impact the system, they’re also far more likely to enthusiastically adopt it.

5. Deploy Your Workflow and Monitor Key Metrics

Deploy your workflow and provide guidance so that your team knows how to use it. 

Be sure to also track key performance indicators (KPIs) like cycle times — the time it takes to complete a workflow from start to finish. The analytics data you gather will prove especially helpful to continue improving your business processes. 

7 Examples of Business Rules

Now that you understand what business rules are and how to create them, let’s look at how you can apply them across your organization. Here are some examples.

Read more: 10 Examples of Business Rules That Make Work More Efficient

1. Routing Documents

Forms like contracts and invoices typically go through an approval process. However, having a senior executive review each one may not be the best use of their time.

You can create a rule like, “Route a VP for additional approval if the invoice amount is above $10,000” to improve turnaround times.

2. Performing Calculations

Manual data entry is time-consuming and prone to errors. You can add a business rule to your forms to automatically calculate totals from other values.

Here’s an example:

This cuts down on manual data entry and reduces the risk of human error.

3. Applying Discounts

You can create business rules to apply discounts on accounts that spend a certain amount. An example could be something like, “Give 5% off if a customer spends more than $5,000.”

4. Requiring Signatures 

Receiving an important form without a signature can be frustrating — you’d have to send the form back and review it again.

To avoid wasting time on constant back-and-forth trips, you can make signature fields required on forms like expense claims and display an error if a signature is missing.

Here’s an example:

5. Enforcing Data Validation

You can also create business rules to specify custom formats for fields. An example is ensuring that users enter social security numbers or bank account numbers in the correct format.

6. Approving or Rejecting Applications

Lenders often use specific criteria to approve or reject loan applications.

You can apply similar rules to processes like contract approvals. For example, you can create a rule that declines a contract if certain criteria aren’t met, saving employees the time it would take to unnecessarily review something that does not make business sense.

Contracts can also have extremely complex and dynamic approval chains depending on the information entered, the departments involved, and ad-hoc changes made along the way by approvers. 

Business rules put guidelines around these approval chains making sure that necessary approvals aren’t skipped, while still affording the flexibility to change things on the fly.

7. Improving Compliance With Internal Policies

Business rules can help improve compliance. 

For expense claims, you can make certain fields required (e.g., image attachments for receipts) and have employees check a box confirming they’ve read the company’s expense policy. 

You can enforce constraints on per diem charges, mileage reimbursements, and business meals automatically without the need to manually verify.

Business rules can also allocate expenses automatically to GL categories or budget accounts depending on data entered in the form. This reduces the need to manually reconcile later.

You can also apply business rules to other internal policies, such as vacation and time-off requests with similar productivity-enhancing automation.

Conclusion

Business rules are powerful tools that can help your organization improve its processes. They use business logic to guide and automate everyday decisions.

The good news is you don’t need a team of developers. frevvo’s workflow automation software comes with a powerful business rules engine. It has a fully visual user interface, so there’s no coding required.

The post What Are Business Rules (and How to Implement Them) appeared first on frevvo Blog.