What is DM?

What is Decision Management?

A look into how decision management enables organizations to automate their business decisions and processes.

As more organizations move further into their digital transformation to gain a competitive advantage, customers and employees increasingly expect streamlined and personalized digital interactions, including self-service options. By using automation as the cornerstone of digital processes, businesses can create and redesign processes to increase productivity, accuracy and satisfaction. Decision management is the combination of machine learning with business rules to help organizations understand the appropriate actions to take in a process. Typically, companies use decision management as part of a larger business automation approach for business operations. After defining which processes to automate, the organization creates workflows that outline the process. When a decision about what action to take next in the workflow arises, you can create a decision model to help determine what happens next.

How do business rules affect decision management?

Business rules are the cornerstone of decision management. When the automation system comes to a decision point in the workflow, the software uses a business rule to decide what happens next. Business rules consist of a conditional statement and then an action to take depending on which condition is met. You can modify business rules as your processes or situations change. For example, a retailer organization uses automation for return fraud detection. When an employee enters a return into the POS, the automation system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly process the customer’s return and purchase history. The system then uses the customer data with the business rule that’s been set up for the system so it can flag customers with more than four returns in the last 60 days. During the holidays, when returns are more common, organizations may change the rule to allow six returns in the last 60 days.

What role does decision management play in business process automation?

• Discover: Identify opportunities for improvement.
• Decide: Determine the course of action.
• Act: Create business applications to quickly address changing requirements.
• Optimize: Augment the workforce with AI-powered automation optimization

Benefits of decision management

Organizations that use decision management as part of an overarching business automation approach often see the following benefits:

Empowered employees:

With no- or low-code software, almost all employees can use decision management without additional support to automate tasks by defining business rules and creating models. In addition to creating more efficiencies, employees can test out-of-the box ideas on their own, which encourages innovation.

Reduced errors:

Even the best employee is going to make a mistake, such as submitting the wrong work request for a new employee or missing a potential return fraud. However, machines do not get tired from long hours or stressed by a long line of frustrated customers in front of them. For many previously manual tasks, decision management significantly increases accuracy.

Smarter decisions:

With decision management, the decisions are based on data and business rules instead of allowing human emotion or bias into the process. Additionally, decision management can be programmed to include data from other similar decisions; machine learning can also be applied to gain insight from other employees’ projects.

More engaged employees:

Because decision management reduces manual tasks, employees are often more satisfied with their jobs. Organizations can then use the additional resources for tasks requiring the human touch, such as customer service or brainstorming.