Lessons from Walldorf
A couple weeks back my firm sent me to Walldorf Germany to participate in partner testing of SAP's new business rules engine BRFplus. I had a great week there overall, made lots of great industry contacts, ate great food and beer, saw castles, and got to watch a public viewing of the Germany / Ghana soccer game. More importantly I see the importance now of clearly removing business rules from application programming and implementing them in a human accessible form. Not just from a implementation perspective either, but from an overall TCO perspective to the business. Here's some bullet points on my lessons learned:
- BRFplus can be used to replace almost all user exit, BAdi and event logic in SAP, since those things are typically used to implement business rules in ABAP.
- BRFplus can be used to replace a lot of custom developed ABAP programs that lean on 'Z' customizing tables.
- BRFplus has the potential to replace a lot of standard SAP customizing in the future
- BRFplus rules use the short text to display rule sentences, instead of using technical names. Ergo, rules are written in English, not in machine language.
- BRFplus has a low learning curve. Any developer can pick it up and use it within a few days. Functional people could learn in a few weeks.
- BRFplus is getting functional/technical/business aligned on SAP projects as it is a tool that anybody can at least read and understand.
- I would like to see BRFplus kept in the pockets of all functional and technical people. How much ABAP could be replaced with business rules? A lot!
- BRFplus should allow the business to directly maintain some of the simple rules themselves. Other rules would still need to be maintained by IT.
- The total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced by using BRFplus since the business is getting ownership back on their rules, as well as the ability to make changes faster since the rules are human readable now.
- SAP projects which come with a BRFplus license should take the opportunity to capitalize by educating the team on what a rule is so that they can identify and implement all business rules in BRFplus.
- SAP customers which have acquired a BRFplus license from another module should consider the extended usage of BRFplus outside of the core module it was included with. Those ABAP programs which keep changing all the time might be easier to maintain if the rules were built inside a rules engine.
- Likewise to the above point, SAP customers which do not have a BRFplus license but do have multiple use cases for business rules (IE: highly complex and expensive ABAP programs) may want to consider the purchase and roll out of BRFplus.
Hopefully some more blogs, or vlogs will come later going through the product itself. I'm also interested in writing about project methodologies (how to document and implement the rules), and BRFplus project estimation methods.


