Sailing Through Changes With OpenEdge and Corticon

Rules and regulations can change quickly, and businesses need to be able to adapt on the fly. Together Progress OpenEdge and Progress Corticon help organizations improve their business agility and update their own rules and policies quickly and easily.

Disruption is at its peak, in everything that we do. This is multiplied by constant regulation and policy changes from state to state and country to country. To gain an edge in the market, we need daily changes to keep up with the competition. Discounts, for example, need to change according to market shifts and to meet consumer habits and behaviors. All of this demands changes to the application. “Change to adapt” is the new mantra for success.

Traditional development ways have changed from Waterfall to Agile as organizations adapt to fast-paced business. How about the traditional way of hard coding rules and policies? Are we completely ready for the new demands on business agility? Can we adopt a new change in policy and release with the new changes in a single day’s time?

Certainly, this would be possible if the business logic could be separated out of your code and independently maintained. It’d be possible if the business logic could be extracted as a set of rules that business analysts could easily modify.

Well, that’s just what an OpenEdge and Corticon integration brings. It allows you to extract your business logic out of the OpenEdge code and add them as rules within Corticon. The advantages are far too many to count. Here are just a few:

1. Complete visibility into your business rules
2. Improved agility and the flexibility of having different rules for different regions or different vendors
3. Business owners can change the rules when needed, and do not need an ABL developer
4. On-the-fly changes to the business rules can be made in just a few hours
5. Core ABL logic is immune from the business changes

Making it Easy to Create and Edit Rules

Now let’s look at sample rules from different sectors. Typical rules would be something like:

If age less than 40
and smoker is “No”
then discount amount = 15%

If age greater than 60
and job is “self employed”
then deny the loan

If Date is Wednesday
and customer is “returning customer”
then discount amount = 5%

The conditions from the above rules will not stay constant forever. In a traditional development model, these rules usually go as IF ELSE blocks deep inside the code, something like:

When we use the Corticon business rules engine along with OpenEdge, the rules are designed in the Corticon Excel-like editor and deployed as a decision service. Now anytime the conditions change, a business analyst can straightaway open the rule in the editor, change the condition, redeploy to the server and you are ready. This provides the much needed flexibility required for current business.

 How Easy Is the Integration of OpenEdge and Corticon?

This is good, but how easy is the integration? Both OpenEdge and Corticon development environments can be seamlessly integrated into one another by sharing the same Eclipse. Once the integrated environment is ready, all that’s needed is to share OpenEdge data structures to Corticon as Corticon vocabularies and you are ready. As an added benefit, Corticon provides complete integrity checks to detect any logic errors in the rules—important when testing rule sets.

So what are you waiting for? Start making our applications more flexible, more configurable and bring more visibility into your business rules today. To learn more about achieving business agility with Corticon Rules, read this informative whitepaper.