In the traditional application structure, the business rules are buried in with the business logic inside the application. This application imbedding of business rules requires changes to the applications code every time the rules need to be changed. This limits the ease of customization and extension. However, moving the business rules outside of the application empowers the business analyst to describe the processing rules independent of the application logic.

This enables adaptability to respond to changes in:

• Corporate policy
• Government regulations
• Customer status
• Contract terms and conditions
• New business models

Business rules are meant to encapsulate chunks of business logic that are subject to change. One key to succeeding with rules engines is to carefully identify those pieces of logic that are "highly volatile." These chunks can be exposed as rules and thus easily modified though the business rules engine tooling. Rules engine facilitate late binding where the specific linkage from business logic to business rules is not defined at implementation time or even deployment time, but is a run-time decision. This creates maximum flexibility.

In the same way that business rules enable the separation of corporate policy from the application, a business process manager facilitates the separation of corporate business processes from the application logic. Using a component-based model of the application constructs together with a business process manager and business rules engine provides maximum flexibility and adaptability.

e1Tech Rules engine offers the following basic functional benefits:

• Externalization of business policy or rules at points of variability where business rule call-outs are inserted into the application code or business process flow
• A language for expressing rules in a straightforward way
• An execution environment for running the rules
• Tooling to allow users to create and modify business rules.

Figure 1. e1Tech Business Rules Engine