JBoss BRMS Saves the Holidays

Well, JBoss Enterprise BRMS may be the best example yet.

Take for instance online and storefront shopping, its something that almost everyone does. This year you probably won’t be surprised to learn that according to the National Retail Federation and Internet Retailer.com , 212 million shoppers visited stores and websites, and total spending reached an estimated $45.0 billion over the Black Friday shopping weekend. Couple that with Cyber Monday when, “E-retailers netted $1.028 billion in sales, the first time online retail sales have topped $1 billion in a single day,” and there is no doubt that retail is a major driving force of the economy and something that affects millions of consumers, and probably you.

Making sure that a retailer can get their product into the consumers’ hands, promote customer satisfaction and store loyalty while helping a consumer take advantage of fast, efficient and competitively priced items is key to retailing success. This is where a businesses rules management system like JBoss Enterprise BRMS can have a significant impact on retail, consumers and the overall economy.

We have sketched a great real-world example of how a businesses rules management system can have a significant impact on both a retailer and shopper. Read on.

Active Decisions for the Holidays
 

Fresh from the sale frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and now into the full swing of holiday shopping there is a mad rush to buy and sell gifts as well as winter items. As a product line manager for a major retail chain, you’ve planned a sale on winter clothing, running for one week, just in time for the holiday and ski seasons to move more product and gain an edge on your competitors. You offer winter coats, hats, scarves, gloves and boots; items that make for good cross-selling. You planned it well, getting with IT weeks ahead of time to get the necessary changes into your Java applications that serve your retail outlets, partners, telesales and web sales.

The day arrives and your sale is running! Sales are going great! But, uh oh, a problem arises. On day 3, you sell out of your primary coat product which is the principal driver of the sales including many cross- and up-sales. Unfortunately, your sales discounts and pricing is buried in Java applications, you’ll need to make an alternative proposal and get IT to make the neccessary changes to keep sales moving along. That will take time – probably a full week, to update the several Java applications where pricing, special sale and discount information are embedded. By the time you make the updates to the various Java applications supporting the four channels, the week long sale is over. You not only lost coat sales, but all the up- and cross-sale potential with gloves, hats, scarves and boots! You did not make your sales plan, revenue is lower than expected and your year-end bonus srinks. This doesn’t make for a happy holiday season.

The Better Way with JBoss Enterprise BRMS

It did not need to happen this way. Your company could have installed JBoss Enterprise BRMS, a business rules management system that enables active decisions to be made in your IT application infrastructure. Your business analyst could have prepared the business rules changes for the following week working in concert with his IT developer colleagues on readying the new business rules for deployment at the start of the week. By using JBoss Enterprise BRMS Web 2.0 rules authoring tools and JBoss Developer Studio, the two groups could have remained in sync on the work increasing productivity and reducing risk of errors.

The day of the sale arrives and your sale is up and running! Sales are going great! But, uh oh, a problem arises. On day 3, you sell out of your primary coat product which is the principal driver of the sales including many cross- and up-sales. Fortunately, you used JBoss Enterprise BRMS and had authored rules for various scenarios so your IT application infrastructure can make active decisions in real-time based on business events as they happen. JBoss Enterprise BRMS makes the necessary changes, instructing the channels to sell a different style of coat to keep sales going with nary a hiccup. Your sale progresses smoothly and your sales exceed expectations! You get a larger bonus than expected and enjoy the holidays.

Optimize Your Business with JBoss Enterprise BRMS

Many business rules are buried in Java applications making them hard to find for the enterprise business stakeholders, hard to update, and probably replicated in multiple implementations in multiple applications. Reduced business responsiveness and customer satisfaction await an enterprise in this situation. We believe that there is a better way with JBoss Enterprise BRMS. JBoss Enterprise BRMS enables your business analysts and developers to work together in a coordinated manner to set up your business rules so that your IT infrastructure can make active decisions in real-time versus requiring many hours of manual intervention over days, weeks or months. If the business rules need to change, that can happen quickly as well using the JBoss Enterprise BRMS authoring and management tools. Your IT team can publish these business rules in a service-oriented architecture, leveraging an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB, such as JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform) and make these rules services available to all applications. By improving reuse and visibility, JBoss Enterprise BRMS offers improved asset reuse, return on investment, speed to implementation and deployment of new business rules, and reduce errors and costs.

Visit the JBoss Enterprise BRMS product page to learn how Red Hat can help your business become more productive and effective!