Decision Engine Features

Fully Automate Decision-Making - Graphically - Without Coding
This feature is unique as it is a platform to build, test, and deploy complex business logic - without programming (either in traditional languages - expression languages - or structured English).

These business rules can be used to:

provide consistent decision making.
make business logic and calculations understandable and changeable by technical business uses.
build/test/deploy business logic quickly, evolve business logic in fully graphical toolset.
perform high speed/high transaction count decisions (often thousands of full decisions a second on a single server).
track and evolve decision logic with full set of integrated analytic tools.
save money by dramatically cutting the cost of creating and evolving critical business logic.

Most organizations recognize the benefits of using database management technology to manage and store data, enabling business people to see, manage and change data easily. The result is that data becomes more relevant and useful. Why not treat business rules the same way?

This is a graphical tool that puts you in charge of your business logic. After logic has been created and verified, it installs onto a server as a web service, exposing this logic for applications to use. (Your logic is easily available to both business users and IT staff!) This functionality does for business rules what databases do for data!

The Symantec Workflow™ decision engine empowers your business people to create their own decision and rule-based applications. The people in your organization with the domain expertise or a business problem to solve can use our intuitive, component based, graphical builder for application development, testing and deployment. As a result, effort is minimized and the dependency on IT staff and developers is reduced. The graphical interface provides the comfort of visualization. This saves time for review and testing.

Some uses of business rule automation:

Financial institutions: financial decisions, making offers, evaluating applications, scoring and segmenting
Data cleansing, data augmentation, data analysis
Online pricing and providing intelligent second chance offers and suggestions
Custom validation logic
"Event Models" within applications where custom handling of events ca be done in business logic
and many more...

Key Benefits

Logic Changes- Even by Non-Programmers
Traditional software development is a costly, time consuming undertaking. Many of your resources are used communicating business logic to technical people, conducting reviews, reporting status, revising and performing iterations etc. This feature allows business people to take control of logic within the context of a larger system, thus reducing cost and increasing business agility
Low total cost of ownership
Due to speedy development and less effort spent on testing and review/rework, the cost of initial development can be reduced by up to 75%. For the same reasons, the maintenance/enhancement capability of the application is streamlined which allows companies to realize a significant cost savings. Your software really can evolve with your business.

Shorter time-to-market, competitive advantage
Because many time-consuming steps are weeded out from the traditional software development model, your rules and decisions can be implemented before your competitors can react.

Decision Engine Features

Large library of pre-built decision and rule components
These components can be combined by you to assemble your business logic. Our over 600 standard components provide a complete coverage of common decision scenarios as well as advanced functionality like integration into the Microsoft Office® product suite, a full calculation engine and many more..

Advanced Decisioning Capability
This funtionality offers a suite of rule components that can be easily assembled to build your decisioning application. The friendly development environment of Symantec Workflow™ allows you to use these component with the confidence of doing it right the first time, no matter how big or complex your decision logic is!

Component-context Template Library
This allows you to save your pre-configured components as a template. This allows you to reuse the configured components in other projects. This unique feature makes it easy for the users to build their own library of context-configured component templates, thereby eliminating the repetition of effort involved in configuring the components from scratch every time they need to be used. Reuse reduces time and resources for new projects.

Integrates With Most Database Technologies
Offering predefined database components that can be configured to work with a variety of databases such as DB2, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgre SQL. Symantec Workflow supports connecting to databases via the database connectivity protocols like ODBC, thus extending the capability to handle virtually any database!

Modular Project Building Approach
This facilitates breaking down a complex business function into modules. These modules are linked in the Decision Engine design environment, to yield a monolithic application which is easily maintainable.

Decisioning is the Foundational Element of Symantec Workflow™
The configuration environment provides the power and flexibility of decisioning to all of the other modules in Symantec Workflow™. It connects the design editor, the compiler and the testing platform, so that you do not need to keep switching between various platforms to perform each of these tasks separately which would have been very tedious.

Data Transformation Capability (Mapping)
This provides specialized component libraries to transform your source application data in a manner that it is readily accepted by your target application. This feature is very useful when building an interface between two different applications with different data structures.

Auto Deploy/ Swap Component Models
All Symantec Workflow™ features can be “swapped" i.e. allowing logic to be replaced and upgraded without restarting your server or taking your applications offline. Swapping a Symantec Workflow™ component model lets all current requests and conversations finish their execution under the existing version of the component model while forcing all new requests or conversations into the new version. In this way, the server can stay up and continue to execute even in the middle of a deployment. This simplifies upgrades and changes without affecting your customers’ use of the existing logic.

MS Office Integration
This feature offers very close integration with Microsoft Office Suite products including Excel, Word and Infopath.

The Power of .NET
Symantec Workflow™ fully leverages the power of the Microsoft .NET platform, which provides the foundational platform for the component model. This automatically passes on the .NET benefits to the feature set: It’s extensible, it runs on your existing stable, scalable and low cost hardware and software platform and it can be interfaced easily with existing applications.

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