In all business operations, there’s an opportunity to make a process faster and easier every step of the way. And that doesn’t just mean replacing your people with technology!
Effective business rules for your systems are gambits for success – provided you implement the right rules at the right time.
So, what rules and approaches do we think will help you streamline your business ops?
1 – Business rules vs. human judgment
It’s important to avoid applying business rules to situations where human judgment and flexibility really would make the difference.
For example, applying rules to financial data analysis is reasonable – and can often avoid errors. However, you would want to apply your professional judgment to assess a request for contract amendment in a crisis, for example, or if a rejected application is resubmitted with alternative or additional financial data to consider.
2 – Streamline your verifications
A business rule to verify customer data is an expected part of the finance application process. However, a step to request additional verification if an application has a thin credit file can save a lot of time.
Adding this extra automated step helps your underwriters to get the right information where they need it without additional manual effort. It also helps avoid a verification request back-and-forth with your staff if asking for extra information automatically doesn’t need staff input.
3 – Identify fraud risks
A fail-safe rule is one that identifies loan applications as a high fraud risk. This is as straightforward as it sounds: you could flag applications that meet two criteria – for example, certain industry types (e.g. cash-intensive businesses) or business age (e.g. companies less than a year old).
You can develop additional fraud detection criteria over time to automatically highlight and filter out high-risk applications for your staff to double-check manually. The key here is to help your staff to focus on the matters (and applications) that really need their attention.
And a bonus tip: business rules aren’t a quick fix!
When you first start to use business rules to improve efficiency, it has to be said: you might not see immediate gains.
This isn’t something to worry about, however. View these rules as a project to be reviewed, tweaked, and optimized gradually over time until you begin to see the results you want. It’s wise to schedule time each quarter to assess existing business rules and develop new ones. Input from your team will be crucial to review business rules, discuss the effectiveness, and consider what changes might work moving forward.
And while quarterly business rule development makes sense, you also need a few weeks to a few months of real-world data in between to evaluate how effective any rules in place are working in terms of data and results.
Worried that business rules will take too much work to maintain? Find out more about how the Solifi wholesale finance platform can make implementing business rules in your operations a breeze.
