Manage Rules

Business rules define the business intent, constraints, and operating boundaries that guide optimization processes. Each rule serves a specific purpose, such as promotion or inventory management, and is grouped with related rules in an appropriate category.

Individual rules provide only part of the information required to understand an expected business outcome. Rules that work together are therefore organized into strategies, which provide a complete representation of the relevant business requirements and drivers.

Rules are reusable across strategies, reducing maintenance effort. Each rule is maintained centrally in the Rules Library. Changes to a rule are automatically available to every strategy that uses it.

Alert rules address specific business conditions but are not assigned to strategies because they are generally independent of business-event-driven strategy changes.

Use the Control and Tactical Center to define business rules and create strategies for supported applications and functional areas.

The following terms are used when working with rules and strategies:

• Rule: Logic that controls a process such as optimization, automatic approval, or alert generation. A rule is based on business requirements and consists of rule criteria and one or more rule values.
• Rule criteria: The conditions that must be satisfied for a rule to take effect.
• Rule value: A value assigned to a field used by the rule.
• Strategy: A group of related rules that work together to support a business objective. Two types of strategies are available:
  • Default strategy: Contains the rules used during batch runs.
  • What-if strategy: Can be selected when performing an ad hoc run from the user interface.