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About Hierarchical Rules for Loyalty Promotions

If you have a complex promotion with many rules, then it might be difficult to create individual rules using the method described in Creating Rules for Loyalty Promotions, because it involves a large amount of repetition. Rules hierarchies allow you to reduce this repetition as follows:

• You can nest rules to create tree like structure of rule criteria and actions.
• Rule criteria are set up as tree branches, and each branch ends with an action leaf.

Rule hierarchies have the following benefits:

• They significantly reduce the number of rules required in complex promotions.
• The engine evaluates the rules by following the tree structure, reducing the time taken to evaluate the rules of the promotion.

NOTE:  The functionality described in this topic requires that you install Siebel CRM Release 8.1.1.10 or later. For information, see the applicable Siebel Maintenance Release Guide on My Oracle Support.

Figure 5 shows the interface used for creating hierarchical rules.

Figure 5. Hierarchical Rules

Benefits of Hierarchical Rules

This example shows the benefits of hierarchical rules.

You have a promotion with three variables and three possible conditions for each:

• Time of Departure (TD). Possible conditions are TD < 6AM, 6AM < TTD < 11PM, TTD > 11PM.
• Number of Available Seats (NAS). Possible conditions are NAS <10, 10 < NAS < 20, NAS >20
• Load Factor (LF). Possible conditions are LF < 60, 60 < LF < 90, LF >90.

If you wrote a separate rule for every possible combination of these conditions, then you would have to write 27 rules. If you had a fourth variable, also with three possible conditions, then you would have to write 81 rules. The same criteria would be repeated in many rules.

This repetition makes it difficult for the Loyalty administrator to enter the rules, and it slows processing because the engine must process each criterion separately.

If you use hierarchical rules, then:

• The first level of the hierarchy includes the three conditions for TD.
• The second level of the hierarchy includes the three conditions for NAS. These are entered for each of the three conditions for TD.
• The third level of the hierarchy includes the three conditions for LF. These are entered for each of the 9 conditions of NAS.

The third level of the hierarchy includes all 27 combinations of the conditions, but the three rules in the first level are only entered once each, and the three rules in the second level are only entered three times each. By contrast, with conventional, non-hierarchical rules, you would have to enter all the conditions nine times each.