When to Use Decision Management

Krista: So thanks Tom for joining us today. Today we are talking about decision management and when to use decision management. So, first question is, what are some signals, some words, some choices that people are making that show they need decision management in their business.

Tom: Well, it really comes down to when we start to say, so what's the problem we're trying to solve? And a lot of times we'll hear people say things like "Well, I want to determine if a particular person is eligible for a policy." Or perhaps they might say that they want to schedule, another keyword, a production schedule. They want to schedule their manufacturing line. Or maybe they want to do something like they want to plan the assignment of resources to a set of tasks. So, these kinds of words or these verbs that we hear are really good indicators that there's probably a decision under there. And then we can start working through the process at that point.

Krista: And so there are different kinds of decision management solutions I understand. So can you walk us through the different types of decision management solutions and when you might use them.

Tom: So typically it goes back to the types of words that we hear. If we hear somebody say that they are wanting to determine if a person is, say eligible, for an insurance policy. That's typically, we usually would solve that with business rules. And the business rules might sound like, for instance, if the applicant is under the age of 16, then they're not eligible for a drivers insurance policy. Another type, if we're looking at an application that was that they'd said that they wanted to say schedule, then we might be looking at say, alright, if you want to schedule, you're really trying to pick a solution amongst a whole bunch of different solutions. And we're trying to do something like maybe minimize cost or maximize profitability. And so typically those kinds of applications, we're looking for equations. So a cost equation, and we're trying to maximize that function or minimize it, depending upon what we're doing.

Krista: Well thanks for walking us through the different kinds of decision management. We'll be sure to determine whether or not we need a system.

Tom: That really hurt. I know we're doing that one again.

Krista: I couldn't help it.

Director: Let's cut it there.