Align Business Goal and Business Logic with Decision Table

Case Study - Loan Company

HPYLoan, a loan company, is aware of the recovery of the property market and is deciding to implement new policy to attract people who want to get a loan for home purchasing.

In order to have a policy that is effective, it must be well thought through and considered. HPYLoan has developed a decision table that depicts the current business logic which helps them to analyze the current loan approval policy and to look for possible changes.

By studying the forth business rule in the decision table, you can see that if a loan applicant wants to get a loan for home purchasing, it requires a manual review process, which may discourage him/her from applying a loan. Therefore, HPYLoan is going to update this policy. They reviewed the conditions listed in the decision table and modified the business rules to represent that if the loan purpose is for home purchasing and if the loan applicant is currently a home owner, the request can be approved directly without further reviewing.

This change will, hopefully, speed up the loan approval process for home owners who want to purchase a new home. The next and final step V&P will take is to announce and promote the new policy.

Try it out

1. Download the decision table sample project.
2. Start Visual Paradigm and open the downloaded project file.
3. Open the decision table.
   
4. Press on the column header of rule 4. By studying the Actions compartment, you can see that if a loan applicant wants to get a loan for home purchasing, it requires a manual review process.
5. Let's modify the rule to that if the loan purpose is for home purchasing and if the loan applicant is currently a home owner, the request can be approved directly without further reviewing. To do this, we need to add a condition to determine if the applicant is a home owner. Move the mouse pointer over the compartment caption Conditions. Click on the add button near the caption.
   
6. Enter Home Owner? as action. Put Y under the forth rule.
   
7. Update the action accordingly. Put Y for the condition Approve loan request immediately and remove the X in Review loan request manually. Finally, the decision table should look like this:
   

Conclusion

Without decision table, one may need to go through a long and tedious process in order to draft a policy that matches with both the market needs and the business goal. But with decision table, you can make quick changes to the business confidently because the tabular layout provides you with everything you need to know in order to understand the current business logic or to incorporate with new ideas, in the simplest and easy-to-read manner.