Business Rules Framework Plus gives control to business process owner

Business Rules Framework Plus – a bit of a mouthful so henceforth we’ll call it BRF+.

The concept is simple; any variable or dynamic parts of a business process or decision can be taken out of the application code and maintained in a user interface built on Webdynpro ABAP. The interface has been designed for both business users and IT experts and it allows a rapid response to changing business scenarios. 

Maintaining rules outside of your application is particularly useful where outcomes are dependent on variable conditions. For example, discounts applied to sales invoices may vary according to quantity ordered and payment terms agreed. The order quantity breaks, payment terms and the final discount applied may change over time or vary depending on season and demand. 

Building the variables into BRF+ allows rapid response to changing business conditions, without the need for a full blown change management process to amend the application. This also removes the need for time consuming testing cycles. The rules can be integrated into your applications standard user exits or called as a web service. Once the rule is in place the dynamic values can be changed independent of the application code.

For those of us who have been around SAP and ABAP for a number of years this is a huge improvement. Who hasn’t been in the situation where only weeks (months if you’re lucky) after your implementation the business move the goal posts and require changes to hardcoded values or configuration. Alternatively, you have the maintenance overhead and security risk of maintaining your own configuration tables in your production environment. 

It shouldn’t be a big deal to change values in decision tables or calculations. With BRF+ those changes can be implemented in a fraction of the time it would take to amend the application code or change configuration. 

Can anything in SAP be quite that simple? Well actually, yes. The critical point is to design your applications to include a breakout to BRF+ for areas where decisions, calculations, classification and so on, may be subject to change. For standard SAP applications, where you need to include your own business rules, you integrate the call to BRF+ in the user exits available as standard.

BRF+ is flexible and your rule expressions can be maintained as a decision table, decision tree, value range, formula, simple case statement or even a function call.BRF+ is subject to SAP’s standard transport management system. This allows you to develop and test your business rules in your development environment. 

Once your rules are defined, tested and embedded in your application code they can be transported to your production environments. The variables and values contained in your rules can then be changed external to your application code giving you an agile response to changing business rules. 

This requires a fresh look at business processes and how they are actioned in SAP. In an existing SAP landscape the rules could be retro-fitted. This would require a project to review your current business processes, how they fit into SAP and where decisions and variables are subject to change or could improve business performance if they could be rapidly adjusted to meet the requirements of a changing market. Alternatively, any new system developments or implementations could include a review of processes and where BRF+ could enhance agility and flexibility.
BRF+ is available as a standard component of SAP Netweaver 7 Enhancement Pack 1. It is available for all your SAP environments – ECC6, CRM, SRM and so on. It can be used independently in each environment or maintained centrally in SAP’s Business Rules Management System (BRMS). BRMS is part of the SAP Netweaver Composition Environment and we’ll talk about that in a future blog!