Companies not only deliver information directly into customer systems, they customize services and data delivery in order to enable rich interaction among systems. An individual may buy his or her books from a single vendor, but a manufacturing company typically sources individual parts from multiple vendors in order to ensure timely delivery and competitive pricing. What's more, that company purchases thousands of different products for its various manufacturing and business operations. If every vendor presents a distinct order interface, it becomes very expensive for the customer to adapt its personnel and business systems to each case. Rather than manually scanning vendor Web sites for updated pricing information, for example, customers automatically receive pricing updates in formats tailored to their internal systems.
Applications can then act on updated data and perform actions based on business rules.
You use business rules to monitor information feeds and then take action when certain events occur. Humans set the parameters of decision making through business rules, but machines are doing the actions. When inventory levels for a product become low, the application sorts through possible actions to determine the most profitable course. The program draws on a continuous feed of product pricing from numerous vendors to determine the best mix of price and availability among its suppliers. The system might even split the order, taking a rush shipment of product at a higher price to fill the immediate inventory shortfall.