Establish and Maintain Sensible Business with Decision Table

Let's take a look at the following cases:

1. Buying a contract phone is more expensive than buying a full-price phone.
2. Buying a CPU/Motherboard combo is more expensive than buying them separately.
3. The discount for frequent flyers who made an early reservation is less than for frequent flyers who made a late reservation.

Weird? Absurd business logic is often introduced due to the increasing complexity of business operations. To make the business logic rational, it is important to apply strategic decision-making skills. A decision table can help here.

Case Study - Airline Discount

Airfare pricing is a very complicated system. Many factors, and the possible combinations of these factors, can affect the fare. Without a thoughtful analysis of all factors, it is difficult to implement a pricing structure that is beneficial to both the customer and the airline. As an airline, QAL is facing this problem.

QAL has long been documenting and managing its airfare pricing structure with document files. Updates were made to the documents for any changes to the policy.

The operations manager of QAL thinks that there must be certain rules conflicting with each other. He wants to study the current policy but finds it nearly impossible because the policy document has become very long, with regulations and rules listed in a disorganized manner. Let's take a look at the document:

To find the problematic policy, he decided to represent the rules in a decision table. Here is the decision table he developed:

By studying the fifth and sixth rules, he discovered that a frequent flyer who made an early reservation would receive a 15% discount, while a frequent flyer who made a late reservation would receive 5% more, which does not make sense. So, he refined the policy, reviewed the changes he made by comparing the rules, and finally updated the information system with this change.

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. Click on the column header of rule 5. Drag to rule 6 to perform a multiple selection.
   
5. By studying these business rules, you can easily find the problem: frequent flyers who make an early reservation enjoy less of a discount than frequent flyers who make a late reservation.
6. Let's correct the business decisions by updating the business actions. Offer a 15% discount to general frequent flyers and 20% to frequent flyers who make an early reservation.
   

Conclusion

A decision table helps to convert complex business rules into an easy-to-read format. Readers can look up and consider the business decisions without difficulty. When multiple rules are placed adjacent to each other, conditions and actions can be easily compared. Nonsensical rules can be figured out and rectified easily and accurately.