Business Rules and Decision Management in Healthcare

The Mortgage Feature Set (MFS)

For organizations that underwrite and sell mortgages, Trisotech is enhancing its Digital Enterprise Suite (DES) with mortgage industry specific (Regulatory and GSE) extensions.

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The Mortgage Feature Set (MFS) option offers fully integrated features and functions that allow organizations to model and automate their decisions and workflows more efficiently.

Critical GSE and Regulation Z decisions and workflows are made available. These critical rules and supported decisions are gleaned from more than 500 pages of GSE and Federal Regulations.

MFS Sample Models

For mortgage underwriters/creditors that sell their mortgages to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, all the critical decisions mandated in Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide and Freddie Mac’s Seller/Server Guide are included for the conventional and HomeReady™ products.

Fannie Mae Sellers Guide Knowledge Models

  • Fannie Mae Conventional Products
  • Fannie Mae HomeReady™ Products

Fannie Mae Sellers Guide Required Decision Models

  • Complete Sellers Guide Decision model for pre-qualification and preclosing
  • B2-1 Loan-to-Value (LTV) Ratios
  • Loan Level Price Adjustment
  • B5-1 High-Balance Mortgage Eligibility and Underwriting
  • B3-5.1 General Requirements for Credit Scores
  • Eligibility Matrix
  • B7-1 Mortgage Insurance Coverage Requirements
  • B3-1 Manual Underwriting

Freddie Mac’s Seller/Servicing Guide Models

  • Complete Sellers Guide Process model for pre-qualification, preclosing, and presales
  • 4603.2 Super Conforming Mortgage Eligibility and Underwriting
  • 4203.2 Loan-to-value (LTV) Ratios (Calculation of LTV Ratio)
  • 5203.1&2 Indicator Score and General Requirements for Credit Scores
  • 4702.1 Mortgage Insurance Coverage Requirements
  • Exhibit 25 Risk Class and/or Minimum Indicator Score Requirements
  • Exhibit 19 Credit Fees

Also included is the important Ability to Repay the decision model from Regulation Z.

Regulation Z

  • Regulation Z decision models
  • 12 CFR 126.43 Ability to repay (ATR) Decision Model
  • 12 CFR 126.43(C)(2)(vi) Monthly debt to income ratio

MFS Knowledge Features

The Mortgage Feature Set provides various common concept models that can be re-used for mortgage model creation. These concepts can be dragged-and-dropped into decision models (DMN), workflow models (BPMN), and case model (CMMN). The concepts can also be linked to any terms in the labels of various model elements. Users can modify the pre-configured entries and create additional entries.

A number of such common concept models include:

Uniform Mortgage Data Program® (UMDP®) Knowledge Entity Model

This Knowledge Entity Model contains concept maps along with definitions of the various concepts associated with Uniform Mortgage Data Program® (UMDP®). The Uniform Mortgage Data Program (UMDP) is an effort undertaken jointly by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the direction of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to enhance mortgage data quality and standardization.

Mortgage Acronyms Knowledge Entity Model

This dictionary of mortgage terms and acronyms was created from the Uniform Services Veterans Mortgage list of mortgage terms and acronyms.

Other concept models are also available in support of provided specific mortgage workflow and decision models.

MFS MISMO Specific Features

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) is a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) responsible for developing standards for exchanging information and conducting business in the U.S. mortgage finance industry.

MISMO Glossary

This Knowledge Entity Model contains a set MISMO related concepts sourced from the MISMO Business Glossary-Term List. Each provided term comes with a definition and source. Focus areas include:

  • Appraisal
  • Closing Disclosure
  • Commercial
  • Data Governance and Management (DGM) Fit For Purpose
  • eMortgage Glossary
  • MISMO Logical Data Dictionary (LDD)
  • Loan Application
  • Loan Delivery
  • MBA Glossary
  • MISMO3.4 iLAD
  • MISMO3.4 ULAD
  • MISMO Approved Acronym
  • MISMO Life of Loan
  • Origination
  • Servicing

Predefined MISMO Data Types

Trisotech provides out-of-the box MISMO aligned data types that can be assigned with one click to elements in Decision models (DMN), Workflow models (BPMN), and Case models (CMMN).

The MISMO Accelerator

The MISMO Accelerator is a comprehensive set of predefined MISMO element structures provided as reusable drag and drop data structures. Simply drag the desired MISMO element to a Decision (DMN), Workflow (BPMN) or Case (CMMN) modeling canvas to obtain an element of that type.

MFS Additional FEEL Functions Features

A complementary library of FEEL functions is included in the Mortgage Feature Set to make the development of financial analysis logic more efficient. Examples of functions added with the Mortgage Feature Set option include:

  • annual interest rate
  • annual nominal interest rate
  • asset depreciation
  • cumulative interest payments
  • cumulative principal payment
  • decimal fraction to decimal number
  • decimal number to decimal fraction
  • depreciation for accounting period
  • discount as percentage
  • effective annual rate
  • first coupon date after settlement
  • fixed rate declining balance asset depreciation
  • future value
  • future value schedule
  • installments interest
  • interest payment
  • internal rate of return
  • last coupon date before settlement
  • modified internal rate
  • net present value
  • number of coupon dates between settlement and maturity date
  • number of coupon days in coupon containing settlement date
  • number of days from settlement date to first next coupon date
  • number of days in coupon from beginning to settlement date
  • number of periods
  • particular payment
  • payment
  • present value

Mortgage Feature Set (MFS)

Mortgage Feature Set (MFS) is an option of the Digital Enterprise Suite

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From Laws and Regulations to Decision Automation

Providing complete traceability and accountability.

Presented By
Tom DeBevoise
Simon Ringuette
Description

Regulations are a set of obligations that apply to corporations and individuals. They can be established through laws or under the authority of a governing body. Regulations may explicitly define processes and rules, but often they prescribe outcomes or performances without detailing how to achieve them.

When an organization must comply with a regulation, it aligns its operations with the obligations specified in the regulation. Compliance is the action of ensuring this alignment. However, demonstrating compliance can be a challenge because organizations must be able to trace their implementation back to the regulation.

To create traceability, a knowledge entity model (KEM) is developed. This model represents the regulation using vocabulary, concept maps, and business rules. The KEM is derived from the text of the regulation, breaking it down into vocabulary terms, concept connections, and business rules.

Using the KEM, an automated solution can be created using decision automation and business process automation (DMN and BPMN). This solution links the business rules to the decision or process as a knowledge source, creating a traceable solution.

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What is Low-Code/No-Code/Pro-Code?

Low-Code No-Code (LCNC), or low code no code as it is sometimes written, refers to how to make an app – computer and mobile applications – that doesn’t require traditional programming skills (Pro-Code.)

Conceptually, using no code platforms, anyone can figure out how to create an app using a few clicks. With low-code solutions, power users and subject matter experts (citizen developers) can build applications using a business-friendly expression language, and, of course, pro-code solutions utilize programming languages like JavaScript, Java, Python and C# where professional development teams are the app creator.

Simply put:

No-Code

=

drag-and-drop and clicks

Low-Code

=

business friendly expression languages

Pro-Code

=

programming languages

Low-code/no-code adoption is a very rapidly growing pillar of the digital transformation movement. With the growing shortage of professional developers, and the increasing requirements for business agility, application leaders are setting up environments where anyone can be a developer. According to Forrester, low-code platforms have the potential to make the software development process up to 10 times faster than traditional development methods.

What is No-Code?

A No Code app builder enables citizen developers, sometimes called business technologists, to create applications without using a programming language. Gartner defines a citizen developer as “a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT”. Citizen developers can drag-and-drop reusable components, connect them together, and create applications.

A no-code approach empowers citizen developers. No-code platforms are designed to help non-programmers create applications with no coding at all and are often used to replace, or even enhance, what would otherwise have been achieved using a spreadsheet. They are also used for simple websites.

Spreadsheets, while powerful, don’t lend themselves to creating an application with a rich user interface. But no-code applications can create an attractive user interface using forms for an application on top of a backend powered by a spreadsheet or a database.

Some of the primary reasons organizations utilize low-code platforms are that: they can build applications 6 to 10 times faster, they can build apps without pro-developers (a scarce and expensive resource), and, the production of no-code applications become up to ten times more affordable.

What is Low-Code?

Low-code and no-code both provide drag-and-drop functionality through an easily navigable graphical user interface (GUI) that pro and citizen developers can use to create applications without having to write thousands of lines of code. Unless you are developing only the simplest applications and require little in the way of customization or connection to existing systems, low-code will always be a better option than no-code.

Low-code development allows for customization using a simple expression language using spreadsheet-like functions. This minimal coding approach enables more skilled power users and SMEs on low-code platforms to customize their application more than a no-code platform. Low code platforms are also good for developing sophisticated applications that can run mission-critical processes. It is also good for building mobile and web apps that require more complex integrations with both external and internal systems.

Three generic types of low-code platforms are emerging. Low-code application platforms (LCAPs) that provide a graphical user interface development experience for citizen developers. LCAPs are a solution to growing application demands from the business and IT budget-related problems. Model Driven Platforms (MDPs) such as BPMS, DMS, and BRMS are low-code technology platforms that implement, manage, and automate business logic, decisions, and processes. MDPs offers visual notations that make them simple enough for citizen developers while being expressive enough for professional developers. Finally, Multiexperience Development Platforms (MXDPs) as Low-code development tools used in multiexperience development platforms. As defined by Gartner, MXDPs use low-code development to increase the productivity of application development in different touchpoints such as web, mobile, wearables, chatbots, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

What is Pro-Code?

Pro-code refers to the use of traditional programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, etc. to create applications. Pro-code allows development of complex prototypes and production systems from the ground up. These applications can build new and existing legacy system connections into the new application and tailor applications to fit precisely within the organization’s architecture. There is no need for the potential compromise sometimes required with low-code and no-code platforms. Since this work is done by IT technology staff, the application structure is thoroughly understood by the development team, and they can easily troubleshoot and correct bugs.

A significant factor in the emergence and growth of low-code/no-code platforms is the result of high demand for new digital applications. Such new apps are part of the wave of digital transformation initiatives in practically every organization. These organizations are turning to low-code/no-code solutions because professional developers are needed on other more complex projects, hard to find, expensive to employ, and because learning traditional programming takes a lot of time and training. LCNC solutions, on the other hand, allow non-technical employees (citizen developers) to assemble application logic even if they don’t know traditional programming languages.

The ability to build applications has historically been designated to professional coders, however, low-code and no-code technology has democratized the skill and ability to build applications such that anyone can do it.
LCNC in Financial Services

LCNC in Financial Services

Some might say that the birth of low-code solutions came with the introduction of spreadsheets, a mainstay of the financial community.

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Going beyond the conventional column and row model of accounting ledgers, spreadsheets offered the ability to write formulas for advanced calculations and later, more and more sophisticated functions far beyond row or column sums and averages. It was the beginning of macro functions and if/then logic processing for non-programmers. This, in turn, led to an explosion of uses for spreadsheets far beyond simple accounting tasks, spawned the proliferation of user-built “applications”, and created a new class of business technologist – the power-user.

Today, with the ever-increasing demand for mobile and online banking services, financial services organizations including retail and commercial banking, insurance, mortgage, investments, etc. need to constantly re-engineer customer offerings just to remain competitive. Several standards groups are providing a way to make transactions and financial processes compatible across many organizations. Examples include MISMO™ (Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization) and FIBO® (Financial Industry Business Ontology). These standards also help low-code vendors create predefined data structures and templates that citizen developers can use.

In the financial services industry, access to customer and market data and the ability to analyze it and personalize it for specific customers is critical. The needed flexibility and efficiency to create these apps is often not available in legacy systems. Combine that with issues like the fierce war for talent raging in the financial industry, development backlogs for requested and required custom applications, slow IT turnaround times, and programmer burn-out, it is easy to see why financial services businesses are turning to low-code/no-code platforms and citizen development as a way forward.

The nature of much of the financial services world centers around cyclical and mundane tasks, month after month, quarter after quarter and year after year. This takes its toll on application developers and line workers alike. About 0.3% of the world’s population are professional software developers, yet everyone is capable of problem solving. Low-code/no-code solutions put application building and how to code an app in the hands of the people who need to solve the problems, rather than only in the hands of professional software developers. This is a very attractive option for people who want to do meaningful work that utilizes broad skill sets and will help with both recruiting and retaining top-performing people. As citizen developers, finance professionals with an interest or skills in business technology can make an impact and become stand-out employees.

This is all great news. McKinsey & Company projects that personalization can lead to 15% revenue growth for companies in the financial services sector. By empowering financial services employees to help create personalized applications, citizen development gives people of all technical abilities the tools to solve business problems using low-code application development. This isn’t just a fad, it’s the future of work.

Trisotech LCNC
in Financial Services

Trisotech is a MISMO™ (Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization) partner and provides DMN and BPMN technology to that standards group. Trisotech also provides BPMN extended modeling support in the form of no-code drag-and-drop “Accelerators” for the MISMO and FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology) standard data structures. Trisotech financial clients include governments, insurance organizations, mortgage finance organizations, loan originators, retail and commercial banks, stock trading exchanges, credit card organizations, real estate brokers, investment brokerage houses and more.

Building low-code financial apps requires access to advanced computational and logical capabilities. Trisotech supports the only international standard expression language perfect for low-code developers – FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) published as part of the DMN (Decision Model and Notation™) from OMG, an international standards body.

LCNC in Healthcare

Whether you believe that “today, all companies are software companies” or that “software is eating the world,” one thing we know for certain is that health and care services are changing, so their IT solutions must change as well.

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LCNC in Healthcare

Healthcare automation needs have become so critical and pervasive that to address these concerns head-on, a community of practice, BPM+ Health, has been created. BPM+ Health was established based on the use of open, standards-based notations including BPMN™ (workflow management) DMN™ (decision management), CMMN™ (case management), and other open IT standards which allows for all types of health organizations, professional societies, and vendors to document their care pathways and workflows, so they are sharable, discoverable, and automatable.

In this age of digital transformations, software is becoming increasingly strategic ad pervasive. Both new care settings and continuously changing medical and pharmaceutical advances are driving an explosion in the demand for new and updated applications yet professional programmers who can build and maintain this software has reached a critical shortage. Other industries are already adopting lowcode and nocode platforms to speed the creation of applications, reduce the backlog, and make application development more affordable. Because professional software developers are an increasingly scarce and expensive resource, everyday employees are stepping up as “citizen developers.” These power users and SMEs already have the domain knowledge needed to rapidly compose their needed applications using low-code tools. The healthcare software revolution is behind the curve and low-code development is rapidly becoming the best option to catch up. However, even as low-code platforms advance, pro-code professional developers will still be needed to create the more complex features and integrations required in healthcare.

Most current Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) are increasing the burden of work on doctors and other care team members primarily because they are neither agile nor provide for innovation capabilities. Surprisingly, while virtually every other business sector is utilizing these new technologies, little is developed with low-code or no code in healthcare. Low-code solutions would seem to lend themselves to patient portal apps, common patient care apps or even complex back-office systems. Using low-code, care givers and other subject matter experts (SMEs) don’t need to learn a professional programming language to create apps but only need to learn an app where they set configurations in a graphical user environment and sometimes a simple expression language. Low-code app development is therefore faster and far less expensive. Using low-code platforms, developers can use agile methods to test the new and changing needs of providers and patients directly during the development cycle. Since low-code platforms provide simple ways to invoke other applications or components via RESTful API calls, apps can easily integrate with existing IT systems and standards such as HL7®, FHIR®, CDS Hooks™, SMART™, and SMART on FHIR allowing new functionalities to be added to existing systems with little or no disruption to current operations.

A hallmark of the healthcare industry is the diversity and volume of data needed to provide the vast array of clinical, administrative, and insurance services patients and caregivers have come to expect while controlling the costs of those services. Just creating and maintaining a comprehensive data layer accessible to all is a major and ongoing undertaking. Add to that the hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, APIs, and interdependencies, the complexity is nearly overwhelming. Emerging standards like FHIR may help. Still, by using low-code composable apps along with FHIR and other data sources, organizations and their citizen developers may be able to modernize faster and more affordably by assembling their own vendor-neutral digital platforms.

Trisotech LCNC
in Healthcare

Trisotech is a founding member of BPM + Health which includes BPMN, as well as DMN and CMMN, as an integral standards technology. Trisotech healthcare clientele include international and U.S. acute care hospitals, healthcare insurance organizations, HMOs, renowned teaching hospitals, PPOs, and healthcare professional organizations.

The Trisotech Healthcare Feature Set (HFS) is an optional set of advanced low code development functionalities extending the Trisotech Digital Enterprise Suite with healthcare-specific additions. Through a combination of these new features and functions, healthcare organizations can now access FHIR®, SMART™, and SMART on FHIR capabilities as well as AI and Machine Learning (ML) in their modeling and automation of model-driven applications. Predefined FHIR Data types (simple, complex, and special purpose) are provided as no-code reusable drag and drop data structures that can be assigned as data objects in model-driven applications and autogenerated SMART on FHIR webapps can be created from automations stored in the Digital Enterprise Suite (DES) Service Library.

Building low-code healthcare apps requires access to advanced computational and logical capabilities. Trisotech supports the only international standard expression language perfect for low-code developers – FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) published as part of the DMN (Decision Model and Notation™) from OMG, an international standards body.

Another no-code feature is the Attended Tasks extension. The Trisotech Attended Task feature allows for validation and confirmation of the inputs and/or outputs of any automated task by the care provider user or any other designated performer. This feature ensures that a knowledgeable human expert can correct/modify information in real time during apps execution.

Trisotech also provides nearly 1,000 pre-built evidence-based workflow and decision models including care pathways, clinical guidelines, and healthcare calculators using the the BPM+ Health standard. These models can be quickly and easily modified to fit the exact nature of anorganization’s policies and procedures. Healthcare organizations can also create their own apps from scratch with the easily understood visual Workflow Modeler (BPMN) that can be shared by IT, practitioners, SMEs, and business people – LCNC citizen developers.

1,000
free pre-built evidence-based workflow and decision models

Trisotech and LCNC

Digital Enterprise Suite

Many of the well-known low-code development platforms are business process management platforms.

BPM has long supported model-driven development (MDD) as how to build an app — where you first diagram the way the software should work before building it. The most popular process development standard supported by most BPM platforms is BPMN. Trisotech is a world leader in model-driven low-code business automation solutions and an active contributor to the BPMN standard. Trisotech whose Workflow Modeler (BPMN) is known as the reference implementation for BPMN modeling tools, also supports the DMN and CMMN standards with graphical modelers and the Trisotech Business Automation Suite of engines for building and automating low-code applications and packaged business capabilities (PCBs). Trisotech provides the only international standard expression language perfect for low-code developers – FEEL. FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) is published as part of the DMN (Decision Model and Notation™) specification from OMG®, an international standards body. Finally, Trisotech provides free application modeling tools through self-service trial subscriptions.

The Trisotech platform provides no-code, low-code, and pro-code capabilities that your organization can configure and utilize to best fit your needs. By providing a spectrum of developmental options, Trisotech Digital Enterprise Suite can help close the Business-IT divide by creating a collaborative and cross-functional environment where both professional developers and citizen developers can work together to build stunning apps. These applications are quick to develop, cost far less than traditional programming methods, and integrate easily with existing legacy systems and data sources as well as new technologies like Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and industry standards such as MISMO™, FHIR, and CDS clinical decision support.

Low-Code/No-Code/Pro-Code

Trisotech
Low-Code No-Code Differentiators

Trisotech’s business automation architecture is built upon SaaS cloud technologies including API-first design which allows for the invocation of services (applications, processes, or packaged business capabilities) from practically any programming language in mobile, cloud, and on-premise server environments. These automated services are scalable with very high-performance. The services and automation engines are also structured to provide full support for today’s complex availability needs including containerization and docker technologies. All low-code no-code application development – modeling and automation – is completely browser based and can be run in any modern browser environment including Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, etc. Automation servers can be hosted by Trisotech, or Clients including on-premises and public/private clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, etc. Advanced configurations allow for 24 X 7 operation, concurrent geographic dispersion and failover, and containerization operating environments.

The Trisotech low-code no-code development and automation platform

provides many meaningful features and capabilities for citizen developers to create an app that other platforms do not.

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Low-code/No-Code/Pro-Code

These include:

OMG®, BPMN™, (Business Process Model and Notation™), Decision Model and Notation™, (DMN™), CMMN™, (Case Management Model and Notation™), FIBO®, and BPM+ Health™ are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Object Management Group, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. MISMO™ is a registered trademark of Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization, Inc. HL7®, and FHIR® are the registered trademarks of Health Level Seven International and the use of these trademarks does not constitute an endorsement by HL7.

CDS Hooks™, the CDS Hooks logos, SMART™ and the SMART logos are trademarks of The Children’s Medical Center Corporation.

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What Are Business Rules and Decision Management?

To meet the demand for enterprise automation over the last few decades, computer programs have become larger and more complex.

To simplify the building and maintenance of those programs, new programming paradigms have evolved. One central method of simplification has been to extract and standardize common computing tasks from the body of application programming source code. One of the first major abstractions was to replace custom data management in programs with Data Base Management Systems (DBMS). The next big movement replaced the step-by-step embedded procedure logic in individual programs with that of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Next came the abstraction of business rules which automated the policies by which organizations operated with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). The latest evolution is the replacement of BRMS with Decision Management Systems (DMS).

Business rules systems work on the principle of rules statements – a trigger then action paradigm – typically in the If->Then->Else style and usually defined in a proprietary “language” along with decision tables. Those rules are then processed when the trigger occurs by a Business Rules Engine (BRE). The tools to define the rules, version, deploy, execute, monitor, and manage them plus the engine are normally bundled together in a Business Rules Management System (BRMS). These systems are highly technical in nature and are usually owned and maintained by IT resources. Direct business subject matter expert involvement is usually quite limited. Instead, subject matter experts (SMEs) harvest or mine (discover) business rules from within the organization and define them as requirements specifications. IT then translates those requirements into rules statements.

Decision Management Systems work on the principle of defining business decisions where the decision answers a specific business question providing the result (output) of the decision based on the values of pre-defined input variables to the decision logic – typically in the Input(s)->Decision Logic->Answer (output) style. The most commonly used decision management technique is Decision Model and Notation (DMN) an international standard published and supported by OMG, an international, open membership, not-for profit technology standards consortium. DMN focusses on decisions – higher level business asset artifacts – that are meaningful to business subject matter experts (SMEs). DMN also provides the Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL), a simple but powerful way to provide logical, textual, mathematical, list processing, interval, date/time and other functions business people need to make decisions.

Decision Management differs from rules management in significant ways. The most important is that rather than just a collection of rules statements, decisions are specific, reusable business logic modules usually created and maintained by business subject matter experts. The DMN standard utilizes visual models which are standardized, verifiable, and where the model serves as the documentation and as the executable source for the Decision Automation Engine. Visual modeling by SME’s eliminates one of the major sources of business rules errors, the “translation” of SME-defined rules (requirements) to IT-created rules. With DMN both the SMEs and IT personnel are working with the same decision model.

Why Are Business Rules and Decision Management Used?

Busines Rules and Decision Management systems are used to free business people and subject matter experts from needing to know and use complex IT programming languages for creating and maintaining the automated policies and logic used to make operational decisions that run their business. By abstracting these rules and decisions from conventional IT application programs and processes, rules and decision systems allow non-IT personnel to create a reusable “single version of the truth” while working directly with existing systems and IT. This abstraction facilitates not only more direct access by business people but also enhances the separation of concerns by making sure the correct people have access to the organization’s policies while providing IT access to the more technical implementation and integration requirements. Business Rules and Decision Management systems abstraction also provides ways to greatly speed up and simplify the creation of and changes to operational decisions resulting in better business agility.

While Business Rules Management Systems continue to be used, their shortcomings have become more pronounced over time. Among these shortcomings are a lack of standardization which forces customers into IT driven vendor-specific proprietary systems and requires higher cost, difficult to find technical personnel to operate. Most recently the advent of cloud computing and customer personalization requirements has disrupted most businesses causing an explosion of rules that has made rules logic more difficult to understand and maintain and that severely restrict agility. Because large business rules repositories contain many thousands of individual rules, they are notoriously difficult to validate and test so heavy step-by-step IT technology involvement is needed and that continuously widens the gap between IT and business subject matter experts.

Decision Management systems based on the DMN standard are, on the other hand, visual model driven, verifiable, standardized, are easily shared between business subject matter experts and IT personnel. A business decision is a reusable tangible business asset that can be automated directly from the visual model without IT translation. Comprehensive visual models in DMN are readable by both IT and business people, serving as a decision specification, the decision logic, the decision documentation, and the automation code – all in a single visual artifact.

Business Rules and Decision Management in Healthcare

Business Rules and Decision Management in Healthcare

The Healthcare industry is very large and extremely diverse including front-line workers – the caregivers and providers – and multitudes of back-office workers.

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Large-scale healthcare organizations are often linked businesses combining and networking physicians, acute care hospitals, long term care facilities and insurance organizations. All these organizations need secure standards-based software to help them store and retrieve data as well as standardize and centralize workflows and decision making across all parts of their business.

Healthcare is also a highly dynamic sector with constant change being generated from regulatory requirements, new procedures, new medicines, new insurance rules and rapidly evolving technologies. Every healthcare organization must be able to quickly set guidelines and policies associated with their data and tailored to their respective delivery systems and business models against which quality of service, cost containment, and patient satisfaction can be directly measured and continuously improved.

Business rules and decision management systems have been used to improve clinical guidelines, care management, prior authorization, billings and payments, off-label prescription policies, fraud management, actuarial and risk management insurance calculations, call center scripting, incorporating AI/Machine learning into decision making, complex process automation pathing and many other applications. Decision Modeling and automation, in conjunction with clinical decision support (CDS), is being used to deliver real-time clinical decision support (CDS Hooks) for providers during their patient encounters. As a result, the providers are able to consider alternative diagnoses, treatments, and potential cost-saving measures for their patients.

Other examples include hundreds of healthcare calculators like BMI, FEV/1, LACE, PEARL, DECAF, Framingham Diabetes Risk, etc. and outside agency preauthorization requirements like Medicare Home Oxygen reimbursement, conventional insurance pre-authorization for Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA), and internal organizational policies on off-label drug use evaluation and approval. Models like these require multiple decisions, often needing specific patient data. Some of these decisions are based on preset external requirements like Medicare policies and some are specific to the decision-making organization’s policies. One size does not fit all, so the models, to be effective, must be well documented and easy to change to reflect changing policies. Business rules and decision management system solutions allow healthcare organizations to easily define and deploy these examples and many more solutions tied to evidence-based best practices.

Healthcare automation needs have become so critical and pervasive that to address these concerns head-on a community of practice, BPM+ Health™, has been created. BPM+ Health was established based on the use of open, standards-based notations including DMN (decision management) and other open IT standards which allows for all types of health organizations, professional societies, and vendors to document their care pathways and workflows so that they are sharable, discoverable, and automatable.

Trisotech is a founding member of BPM + Healthcare and Trisotech healthcare clientele include international and U.S. acute care hospitals, healthcare insurance organizations, renowned teaching hospitals, and healthcare professional organizations.

The Trisotech Decision Modeling and the Decision Automation Engine provides healthcare providers with centralized, easy-to-understand and change standard process and decision methodologies. These tools adhere to international standards for building processes and decisions and support other standards like FHIR® (HL-7®) for data storage and retrieval, CDS Hooks for real-time decision support at the point of care and PMML execution for the inclusion of AI and Machine learning into automated decision models.

1,000
free pre-built evidence-based workflow and decision models

Trisotech also provides nearly 1,000 free pre-built evidence-based workflow and decision models including care pathways, clinical guidelines, and healthcare calculators in the BPM+ Health standard that are being put into practice every day. These models are human-readable, machine automatable, and embeddable in most medical encounter systems. Healthcare organizations can use these models, created under the direction of Trisotech CMO John Svirbely, as they are, or quickly and easily modify them to fit the exact nature of their organization’s policies and procedures. Healthcare organizations can also, of course, create their own processes and decisions from scratch since the easily understood visual models can be built and shared by practitioners, IT and business people.

Business Rules and Decision Management in Finance

Business Rules and Decision Management in Finance

The financial industry is facing an accelerating pace of change with Fintech start-ups, increasing regulations, and disruptive new business models.

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Financial institutions need to rapidly adapt to this new reality and accelerate their digital transformation to meet and exceed their clients’ expectations. Those unable to do so will inevitably lose market share to emerging new companies or competitors able to transform more rapidly. For example, incumbent lenders that still use manual and paper-based loan approval procedures have faced a hard stop when their employees were forced to work remotely.

There is widespread use of business rules and decision management systems in finance. Like healthcare, much of the financial industry is highly regulated at both the federal and local levels and requires stringent compliance and reporting. Furthermore, these regulations are frequently changed and differ from place to place. Managing the sheer volume of these requirements is a significant component of business costs.

The use of business rules and decision management systems in finance includes a nearly endless list of key policy and procedure decisions including regulatory compliance, regulatory risk assessment, operational risk assessment, general and specific underwriting, cross selling and up-selling decisions, complex process automation pathing and the utilization of standards such as the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO), the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), and the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD) standard in the insurance and other industries.

Some common examples of business rules and decision management systems use in the financial sector include pricing decisions, claims handling decisions, complaint handling and mitigation decisions, risk mitigation decisions, product compliance decisions, compensation profit sharing and bonus decisions, and anti-bias decisioning. The use of business rules and decision management systems in controlling complex workflow paths is practically universal and decision management systems incorporating AI and Machine Learning is a very rapidly growing area.

Trisotech financial clients include governments, insurance organizations, mortgage finance organizations, loan originators, banks, stock trading exchanges, credit card organizations, real estate brokers, investment brokerage houses and more.

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Business Rules and Decision Management Offerings

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Trisotech is a world leader in providing decision management solutions. Trisotech fully supports the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard for modeling and the Trisotech Decision Automation Engine for automating DMN models. This support includes full Conformance Level 3 compliance and supports the very latest version of the standard.

Trisotech’s Digital Automation Suite coupled with the Digital Modeling Suite is a decision management platform superior to any other product on the market. Its modern architecture is built around SaaS cloud technologies including API-first design which allows for the invocation of automated decisions from practically any programming language in mobile, cloud and on-premise server environments. These automated decision services are stateless, atomic and provide scalable high performance straight through processing. The automated decision services and decision automation engine are also structured to provide full support for today’s complex availability needs including containerization and docker technologies. The decision making platform’s modeling and automation is completely browser based and can be run in any modern browser environment including Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, etc. Automation servers can be hosted by Trisotech, or Clients including on-premise and public/private clouds like AWS, Azure, Google, etc. Advanced configurations allow for 24 X 7 operation, concurrent geographic dispersion and failover, and containerization operating environments.

Trisotech has also expanded the decision management platform to include specific support for advanced technologies like AI/Machine learning with the inclusion of PMML models in the modeling environment and a PMML execution engine in the automation environment. Decision model creation, testing, administration and management as well as automation library management, administration, configuration, debugging, simulation and audit logging are all visual and browser based making Trisotech’s offering a complete decision management and automation solution.

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What is Business Process Management?

What is BPM?

All businesses have processes. Processes are typically differentiated from projects because processes are predictable and repeatable. They are the building blocks of operating a business.

While many organizations have similar fundamental processes, the unique parts of their processes, dictated by their specific business methods, form the basis of the organization’s competitive advantage and often their “culture.” A process can be defined as a series of steps leading to identified outcomes. Common business processes are often named with descriptions like Opportunity-to-Order, Order-to-Cash, or Employee Onboarding. The sequence of work and steps performed can vary from instance to instance based on inputs, decisions, timing, dates, etc. However, regardless of the value of these variables, to properly define a process one must know all the possible paths and outcomes in advance i.e., predictability.

Business Process Management is a management discipline with the key goals of discovering, modeling, analyzing and optimizing business processes. While some BPM solution providers might include business process automation – a BPM engine or automation platform – as part of BPM, Trisotech defines process automation as a separate discipline. As a methodology, BPM can be thought of as similar to (and sometimes encompassing) other methodologies like continuous improvement (CI) or total quality management (TCM).

Why is BPM Used?

Once a predictable process has been defined through process discovery, it can be optimized – often called process improvement – and performed over and over in a standard way i.e., repeatability. By the act of discovering and defining a process, the resulting process documentation becomes a valuable organizational asset. The use of BPM can improve business operations’ performance and agility, lower costs and add value to customer products and services. Often cited specific benefits include higher efficiency and productivity, reduced costs, increased revenue, better agility, operational consistency, greater customer service focus, better regulatory compliance, increased security, and higher operational visibility.

Business Process Management Software in healthcare

BPM in Healthcare

Utilizing Business Process Management in Healthcare provides a huge array of opportunities to deliver better patient care and services, reduce errors, improve profitability, and ensure regulatory compliance at every level.

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Process-driven healthcare organizations can create standardized clinical guidelines that facilitate consistent organizational policy, patient diagnosis, treatment, and reporting for both individuals and populations. Business processes can also provide real-time feedback and recommendations to providers, be embedded in most patient encounter systems, and integrate the use of standards like FHIR® and CDS Hooks.

Business processes are not just valuable in the clinical setting, however. They are also extensively used in healthcare insurance and patient services settings. Examples of these types of processes include claims processing, pharmaceutical and durable medical equipment (DME) pre-authorizations and patient, provider, and facility scheduling.

Business Process Management Software in finance

BPM in Finance

Business Process Management is helping to fuel the disruptive FINTECH industry as well as assisting existing financial institutions and service providers in transforming the way they do business to remain competitive.

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End-to-end business processes are facilitating the digital transformation revolution that has put the customer in the center of a 360 degree organizational view. That in turn has led to the optimization of existing operations and customer-centric policies and procedures. Standardized processes lead to higher operational visibility as well as better and more easily audited regulatory compliance.

BPM is driving better risk assessment and management, underwriting decisions, lending automation, servicing automation, insurance claims processing, and many other financial activities. By using predictable and repeatable business processes the financial industry is experiencing higher growth rates, greater profitability, more rapid digital adoption, higher rates of compliance, improved efficiency, and better security than ever before.

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What is Business Process Management Software from Trisotech?

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Trisotech provides 100% browser-based business process management discovery and modeling tools in cloud-hosted or on-premise environments. The process discovery tool – the Discovery Accelerator – helps business people describe the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of how their processes work through simple interactive screens and/or existing written policies, guidelines, business rules or other documents. These business observations can then be turned into an initial workflow starter diagram with the click of a single button.

Business processing modeling software from Trisotech – the Workflow Modeler – is used to produce a visual workflow using the international standard BPMN (Business Process Management Notation) via an intuitive drag-and-drop visual interface. These model diagrams provide comprehensive documentation, analysis, collaboration, and reporting features recognized as the gold standard in the process modeling industry and can be used directly by the Trisotech business process automation software. Using Trisotech’s BPM tools and combining the Workflow Modeler business process mapping software with the Trisotech Business Automation platform gives customers an unrivaled, powerful, and comprehensive low code/no code application development capability.

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What Does a Workflow Management System Do?

Workflow Automation software executes computer-driven flows (processes) of human and system tasks, documents, and information across work activities in accordance with flow paths based on business decisions. Workflow Management software also ensures processes – both internally across organizational boundaries, and externally for Customer/Client interactions – are optimized, repeatable and auditable while still being quick and easy to change.

While Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been making inroads in automating tasks within processes, Workflow Automation software is far more powerful than RPA. However, the two are both compatible and synergistic. RPA bots can automate individual tasks within a business process, but they typically can’t connect those tasks together. Good workflow engines allow RPA tasks to be included as part of a process.

Workflow Design software and Workflow Process software are being effectively used in practically every industry, frequently serving as standard operating procedures software. Digital Workflow software can be especially effective and valuable in two industries: Healthcare and Financial Services.

Workflow Automation Software
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The Healthcare industry is large and diverse. While the focus in healthcare is usually on the front-line workers, the caregivers and providers, there are also multitudes of back-office workers.

Large-scale healthcare organizations are often in linked businesses, networking physicians and other providers, acute care hospitals, long term care facilities and insurance organizations. Using Trisotech’s Business Process Management software all these organizations can create secure standards-based software to help them store and retrieve data as well as standardize and automate workflows and decision making across all parts of their business.

Most healthcare providers want standard processes and decision methodologies that are centralized, easy to understand, automated through workflow engines, and quickly changed by SMEs without resorting to the need for heavy IT involvement. This, in turn, frees up IT resources to work on centralizing, consolidating and making available the latest technologies across organizational silos. This includes providing technologies to support standards like FHIR® for data storage and retrieval, Clinical Quality Language (CQL) and CDS Hooks for clinical decision support in real-time at the point of care. Trisotech’s Workflow Design software and Workflow Automation software supports all these standards and allows automated processes to be fast and easy to change as regulatory requirements and new medications and procedures evolve.

Using Trisotech’s workflow management software, healthcare organizations can develop evidence-based workflow and decision models that are human-readable, machine automatable, and embeddable in most medical encounter systems. While healthcare organizations can and do create their own automatable models, Trisotech also provides pre-built models including nearly 1,000 free customizable care pathways, clinical guidelines, and healthcare decision calculators in the BPM+ Health standard. This way, Trisotech’s process management software enables practitioners to stay updated, accelerate solution adoption and ensure greater consistency in care execution. Additionally, the comprehensive visual models offered by the Workflow Design software are readable by IT, providers and business people, serving as a guideline specification, the guideline logic, the guideline documentation, and the automation code for the workflow engine – all in a single visual artifact!

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Moving to evidence-based practices is very desirable but also often difficult for healthcare organizations. Subject matter experts (SMEs) and clinicians constantly work with IT to translate large volumes of regulatory, new medication and procedure information into organizational policy. This is a consistent and expensive requirement for SMEs using their existing, often antiquated systems to keep information up to date. Trisotech’s Workflow Design software and Workflow Automation software solutions allow healthcare organizations to easily define and deploy evidence-based best practices that offer a consolidated view of the interactions and multiple touchpoints with patients, care pathways, and workflows at the point of care.

Back-office tasks such as pre-authorization, medical necessity determinations and off-label drug prescription approvals have a huge bearing on patient experiences. They are also time-consuming, expensive and highly manual activities. Utilizing Workflow Process software for these types of activities expedites decisions for waiting patients, allows for services to be rendered sooner, and increases ROI. Using Trisotech’s digital workflows paves the way for improving both the perceived and real quality measurements for any healthcare organization.

Healthcare Payers and Insurers are also leveraging Trisotech’s process management software to automate processes like claims processing and pre-authorization determinations, leading to more efficient decision making and significant cost savings. Trisotech’s Automated Workflow software can ensure the correct information is collected at the outset, help pay claims rapidly and organize case management for disputed or confusing exception claims. The workflow software also helps payers keep complete records in case of an audit. Health plan members benefit from a better experience as they can access the care they need with minimal delays and without surprises at the time of claim payments or billing.

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Workflow Automation Software
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Financial services make up one of the economy’s most significant and influential sectors. This sector is made up of Banking Services including Retail Banking, Commercial Banking and Investment Banking. Also included are Investment Services, Insurance Services and Tax and Accounting Services.

These businesses are composed of various financial firms including banks, finance companies, lenders, investment houses, real estate brokers, insurance companies, etc. Trisotech has customers using its Workflow Design software and Workflow Automation software in all of these businesses. The typical description of this sector is Financial Services, but it is really made up of both services and Financial Products like mortgages, investments, credit cards, insurance policies, etc. This means that it is not only a business-to-business (B2B) sector but also has a huge business-to-consumer (B2C) component. Marketing, selling and servicing these products is fertile ground for Trisotech’s Workflow Automation software.

Various forms of proprietary financial software have been in use for decades and the adoption of those early technologies now presents the industry with an increasing risk in the form of technical debt. Old technologies are being disrupted by newer cloud-based offerings which include standards-based business process management software that is far better suited to meet the rapidly changing personalization, self-service, risk and compliance needs of today’s marketplace. Indeed, improving client service by automating policies, accounts, investments, claims and more using digital workflows is a cornerstone of the digital transformation efforts in financial services. To simplify the complex process of digital transformation and in order to streamline their processes and decisions, financial enterprises should render organizational workflows and business decision logic into international standards-based visual diagrams and documents. When using Trisotech’s Digital Enterprise Suite, not only can those visual diagrams be shared by business people and technical people they can also be automated by Trisotech’s workflow engine directly from those visual diagrams.

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Technology replacement is also very important because most organizations have their knowledge, policies and procedures embedded in large complex programs maintained by IT programming staffs. Today, “old school” practices like SMEs maintaining Excel spreadsheets for policies and rules (regulatory and organizational) that then must be “translated” by IT into traditional programming languages and proprietary rules systems are giving way to visual models incorporating standardized “decision services.” Using Trisotech’s Digital Enterprise Suite, modern workflows and decision services can be built and maintained by SMEs and turned into automated business processes by clicking a single button. This, in turn, frees up IT resources to work on centralizing, consolidating and making available additional more current technologies across organizational silos.

Challenges

Primary challenges the financial industry is facing today include rapid and often massive regulatory changes, privacy, security, and fraud prevention, surpassing or keeping up with the competition by exceeding customer expectations, and replacing old technologies with emerging technologies. Trisotech’s workflow software is already recognized as the reference implementation for many international standards such as BPMN, CMMN, and DMN. In the financial industry Trisotech is rapidly taking a leadership position with its implementation of the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) standard and support of other standards like the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), common database connections and multiple AI techniques.

For Fintech organizations, Trisotech’s Workflow Design software and Workflow Automation software accelerate digital transformation by providing the ability to easily define, deploy and maintain improved decision-making and workflows supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning in a graphical environment. While Trisotech’s Digital Enterprise Suite is being used by customers for everything from retail credit card processing to insurance claims processing, one area, underwriting, has been of particularly high value to customers.

Underwriting is the process by which an institution takes on financial risk – typically associated with insurance, loans or investments. Underwriting means assessing the degree of risk for each applicant prior to assuming that risk. That assessment allows organizations to set fair borrowing rates for loans, establish appropriate premiums to cover the cost of insuring policyholders, and creating a market for securities by pricing investment risk.

Underwriters evaluate loans, particularly mortgages, to determine the likelihood that a borrower will pay as promised and that enough collateral is available in the event of default. In the case of insurance, underwriters seek to assess a policyholder’s financial strength, health and other factors and to spread the potential risk among as many people as possible. Underwriting securities determines the underlying value of the company compared to the risk of funding its capital acquisition events such as IPOs. All of these activities lend themselves to digital workflow software solutions.

For example, mortgage loan origination. By utilizing Trisotech’s Workflow Design software, customers are able to build standard operating procedures software for loan origination that encompass the organization’s specific underwriting policies. These workflows can be created and maintained by underwriting experts while complex mathematical models, AI and privacy and security requirements are taken care of by IT personnel. Trisotech provides for all of this in a single common visual model understandable by both the business people and the IT personnel while still maintaining separation of concerns through granular permissions. Once the visual model is complete, a single button click can automate the workflow and make it available to Trisotech’s workflow engine part of the Workflow Process software.

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What Is Workflow in Software?

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The unique capabilities of Trisotech’s Automated Workflow software are rooted in its ability to simplify the complex process of digital transformation for all. In order to streamline their processes and decisions, enterprises must first know what those processes and decisions are. Discovering and validating them is the responsibility of business leadership not solely IT. Thus, a must-do activity of digital transformation is rendering organizational workflows and business decision logic into international standards-based visual diagrams and documents. Then, they can be shared by business people and technical people and automated directly from those visual diagrams.

Trisotech calls this process Business Services Automation. The Trisotech offering includes visual Workflow Design software and visual Workflow Automation software.

Trisotech Workflow Automation Solutions

Digital Modeling Suite icon

Workflow Design software

The Workflow Design software includes workflow automation software (BPMN), decision automation software (DMN) and case management automation software (CMMN) along with a larger suite of application tools that facilitate workflow discovery, promote organizational standards use and support workflow design life cycles. The software also supports AI and RPA integrations, full API support and the configuration and management of users, permissions and models.

Digital Automation Suite

Workflow Automation software

Trisotech’s process Workflow Automation software includes workflow engines that can directly execute the business process management models. These workflow engines are utilized through RESTful APIs, provide the highest levels of privacy and security and can be containerized and thus scalable on demand across a wide variety of public and private cloud configurations including high availability configurations.

Trisotech’s Workflow Automation software also provides a full rich visual configuration interface supporting server environment configuration, audit logs, debugging tools and management of running workflow instances. Trisotech’s digital workflow software is high in value, low in cost and backed by world-class technical support.

Put succinctly, Trisotech’s Digital Automation Suite (DAS) is an API-first, container-based scalable cloud infrastructure for business automation. It enables complex automation of business workflows, cases and decisions in a simple, integrated run-time environment. It allows organizations to leverage business automation as a source of competitive advantage, via high performance, flexible, and linearly scalable automation engines. The Digital Automation Suite also offers an outcome-driven orchestration of AI and other emerging technologies using international standards and a microservices architecture.

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Sandy Kemsley's Blog - In financial services, process rules content
Sandy Kemsley
Blog

In financial services, process rules content

By Sandy Kemsley

Read Time: 5 Minutes

I came into the process automation industry by way of content-driven workflow: the scanning of a paper document – such as an application form – triggered a workflow that was focused on manual data entry of the information on this document into a transaction processing system. I became more interested in how to design and optimize the process side of things, but never lost sight of the fact that unstructured content (documents, emails, media) is an integral part of many processes. What became increasingly apparent is that in order to have properly-governed content-rich processes, process must control access to content, in addition to whatever controls are in place in the content management systems themselves.

This is especially true of complex customer-facing processes such as insurance underwriting and claims, where the underlying purpose of the process is to collect sufficient information in order to make a decision (whether or not to insure, or whether to pay a claim) and set a value associated with that decision (the premium or claim amount). Some of that information comes in the form of data, captured from the customer in a web form or manually entered from their submitted application, but some will be unstructured content: property evaluations, photos, proof of income, medical reports, and more. This content may need to be accessed by anyone involved in the process, including the underwriter, claims manager, other internal workers, third parties, and even the customer themselves.

However, you can’t just give all of these people open access to the content: there must be limits set on who can see what content, and at what point in the process. This is where process and rules come into play, plus some clever handling of the content itself.

First of all, there’s the question of whether someone should be able to see a piece of content at all: this is usually based on their role and the particular task that they are performing within the process, but may also be filtered by the specific case or customer. For example, a junior underwriter may be able to see all content related to all of their customer cases and also access similar cases for context, but must be prevented from accessing content related to high-profile customers such as politicians or their own company executives. A third party, such as a property evaluator, may require access to some of the content in order to determine the scope of their evaluation, but only for the cases assigned to them. And the customer should be able to see the documents that they submitted as well as some of the underwriter’s work in progress, although not anything that would violate company confidentiality or that of other customers.

Next, there’s the question of whether someone should be able to see all of the information within a particular piece of content. This is especially true of content such as application forms, which may contain private customer information such as banking details. Even if someone has access to the content based on their role in the process, some part of the content may need to be redacted to ensure customer privacy.

A good content management system will apply both access control and redaction based on the specific user, but that misses two key things: first of all, the same user may take on different roles in the context of different processes, and thereby require different types of access. Secondly, most companies don’t keep all of their information in a good content management system: instead, it’s spread across an ad hoc collection of content management systems (some of them dating back decades) and network file shares. Internal employees have too much access, and can directly access any content that is available on their internal network. External third parties and customers aren’t given enough access, since they can’t see any of the internally-stored content even if they need it for their own work.

Sandy Kemsley's blog - In financial services, process rules content

The solution is to allow processes to rule access to content, with content privacy controls designed into processes. This provides an extra layer of role-based governance above what is present in the underlying content management systems. Instead of process participants swiveling over to a content management application to look up related documents, the process would provide them with direct links to the documents that they need and to which they have access, and specify any required redaction to be done by the document viewer app. Since the content access is controlled by the current role and task in the process, this can be used by external as well as internal participants, although there are a few technical hurdles to overcome in staging documents for external access.

If you’re reading the previous paragraph and scratching your head, saying to yourself “well, of course it should be done that way”, you’re right: it should be done that way. And in many companies and industries, it is done that way. However, there are a lot of laggards where it’s more often like what I described previously: a somewhat disorganized collection of content related to and created by processes, stored on multiple internal systems, with little or no internal access control, and no external access. In fact, I would say that in every insurance and financial operation that I’ve visited as a consultant, I’ve seen some variation of this lack of content governance, and the very real impacts on operational performance as well as privacy concerns. This is definitely a situation where process can come to the rescue for getting control over access to unstructured content.

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Automation of Loan Origination using Process and Decision Services

The financial services industry has long sought a truly digital mortgage. Far too much of the industry still relies on manual, paper-based processing for tasks like loan origination. These deficiencies were highlighted during the pandemic when that reliance on manual processes created problems on top of those already experienced: lack of consistency, auditability, accuracy and efficiency. It is not an agile approach!

Learn how using the Trisotech Digital Enterprise Suite (DES) allows you to visually define processes and decisions that are directly automated to streamline loan origination processes resulting in productivity increases internally and satisfaction increases externally!

As presented by:

Brian Stucky, Quicken Loans, Team Lead – Rocket Technology Ethical AI
MISMO – Residential Governance Board, Co-Chair Decision Modeling Community of Practice
and Denis Gagné, CEO & CTO at Trisotech.

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Bruce Silver's Blog - Business Automation Services in Fintech
Bruce Silver
Blog

Business Automation Services in Fintech

By Bruce Silver

Read Time: 7 Minutes

In client engagements, I am seeing growing interest in what Trisotech calls Business Automation as a Service. I am seeing it particularly in financial services, but I expect it applies in health care and other verticals as well. Financial services, for so long reliant on legacy applications, is now racing to create new cloud-based apps built on modern architecture, where business automation services built with BPMN and DMN are a great fit. This post will explain why, and how it’s done.

The pattern I am seeing starts with software product idea from a subject matter expert. How the software is supposed to work is expressed as a collection of Excel tables that illustrate table updates in response to various business events. The goal is to create a web application that replaces Excel with SQL database tables and automates the table update logic based on attributes of each event in combination with the existing tables.

Examples I have worked on range from loan underwriting to accounting. The client is typically a startup or a service provider getting started as a software provider. In the early stages their programming resources are thin and focused on the more conventional aspects of web application development: database views and reports, analytics, administrative functions, and the occasional manual update of the tables.

The core IP is focused on the automated table updates. BPMN and DMN play a key role there because numerous details of the logic typically remain to be worked out. Excel is great for creating examples, but when you need to generalize the logic for automation in response to any possible event, you often find you need to tweak the table structure or even add new tables. That’s why creating a spec for developers at this stage is a losing battle.

With BPMN and DMN — at least as implemented by Trisotech — the subject matter experts can create the executable logic themselves. If you can create complex models in Excel, you can create automated versions of those models and make the necessary adjustments yourself without getting in line for developer resources. Moreover, those automated models can be deployed as cloud services called by the “conventional” parts of the web app.

For example, I am currently working with a client developing an accounting app for companies that buy, sell, and hold a variety of financial assets: loans, securities, and such. Business events received from the trading system, in combination with time-based events such as accumulated interest and “mark-to-market” revaluation, result in table updates for each such asset, and these tables ultimately are rolled up into the company’s financial statements. If it sounds complicated, trust me, it is.

The solution method that I have found to work well in these situations is based on three basic elements:

Each type of business event, whether received from an external source or user interaction, is associated with one decision service and one process service. Each instance of the event triggers the process service, which in turn calls the decision service.

OData is an OASIS standard for cloud-enabling databases. I wrote about it in a recent post. OData automatically creates an XML metadata file equivalent to an OpenAPI (Swagger) file normally used to define REST APIs. Upon import of that file, Trisotech instantly exposes to BPMN and DMN Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations for all the tables and converts the datatypes used in these operations to their FEEL equivalents. OData’s value here is that it allows subject matter experts to modify the table structures and instantly regenerate the REST APIs for all table operations. This is critical when the tables are not finalized and locked down. With Swagger, my experience has been that if you need to wait for the developers to modify the REST APIs, it’s hopeless. By then, things have changed again.

Below you see the basic application architecture:

Business Automation Services receives business events from both external sources and the web app. Each business event triggers a BPMN service that uses OData to retrieve table data, calls a DMN service to generate new table rows, and then uses OData again to insert the new table rows. The web app provides views, reports, and analytics on the table data.

The BPMN process looks like this:

In this simplified example, the process references Table A and manages updates to Tables B and C. Upon receipt of the business event, the process first validates it by matching it to some existing record in Table A. Assuming it is found, the event is recorded in an event table. OData generates a unique ID for every record and the ID of the business event is saved as a process variable used to establish identifiers for records in Tables B and C. This example just has 3 tables, but typically there may be 6-10 or more, and logging the business event is typically followed by OData Find (query) of other tables to obtain the data needed for the decision task.

Each process includes a single decision task that generates new rows for all tables. In the process diagram you see the decision task inputs and outputs visualized as data associations from and to data objects (process variables). The decision task invokes a single DMN service in which the data input associations in the process map to the input data elements, and the output decisions in the decision model map to the data output associations in the process. Following the decision task, the decision outputs become the inputs of multiple OData Create (insert) operations. For auditability, all the table updates are inserting additional rows, not updating existing rows. OData Create inserts a single record, so in the case where multiple records are generated, we use a multi-instance service task. As we have discussed in the past, Trisotech uses FEEL boxed expressions to map between service parameters and BPMN/DMN variables, so subject matter experts can do this without programming.

Here is how it works in practice.
  1. We start by defining the database tables. With MySQL, for example, we use phpMyAdmin.
  2. From the OData gateway, we download the XML metadata file for the database. Even though DMN is not calling any services, we import the metadata file into the DMN Operation Library as a way to capture all the table datatypes at once.
  3. The real work is developing the DMN model, which is where the logic generalizing the Excel examples is performed. The decision model must create an output decision for any table where new rows are inserted. After testing the logic, we define a decision service specifying its inputs and outputs, and publish it to the Trisotech Cloud. The service inputs define the data that must be supplied by the process to the decision task.
  4. In BPMN, again we import the metadata file to the Operation Library. The OData API supports 5 operations for every table: Find (query), Get (by ID), Create (insert), Update, and Delete. Our method requires just Find and Create. In BPMN, each service task is configured to a particular table and operation, and mapped to input and output data. We discussed how to use these operations in a previous post.
  5. The decision task is configured by linking to a deployed decision service in the Trisotech environment, and again providing data mapping to the process variables.
  6. You can now publish the process to the Trisotech Cloud, at which point it is an executable REST service.

This is the basic recipe, and it is accessible directly to subject matter experts without getting stuck in the developer backlog. OData is quite valuable while the table structures and logic are still evolving. Once they are finalized and locked down, you can either stick with it or provide a final spec to the developers to create your own database APIs.

This method allows the vision for your cloud-based event-driven app to be realized quickly and demonstrated to prospective clients and investors. The only new skill you need to do it is DMN modeling to generalize and automate the Excel logic. And we have training for that! The great thing about DMN is it is designed to be used by subject matter experts… so if you can create your fintech app by example in Excel, you can learn to bring it to life using Trisotech Business Automation services.

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Sandy Kemsley's Blog - Not the New Normal for Mortgage Lending
Sandy Kemsley
Blog

Not the New Normal for Mortgage Lending

By Sandy Kemsley

Read Time: 5 Minutes

I gave a presentation recently (virtually, of course), talking about how intelligent automation has become critical for business survival as we learn to live with disrupted supply chains, remote work, fluctuating demand and different markets. I finished that presentation with a thought that I want to start with here: the question is not, “is this the new normal”; rather, the question is “why weren’t we doing things this way before”?

As I look back at the past year, there really haven’t been any quantum leaps in automation technology during that time. What has changed, however, is the adoption of the technology. Companies that claimed that they couldn’t work remotely because of compliance, or couldn’t automate processes because of cost, or couldn’t perform online customer transactions because of regulations, have discovered that none of those reasons are really true. The pandemic has disrupted lives and businesses, but it has also transformed how business gets done. I don’t want to downplay the human tragedy that we have seen unfold over the past year, but in the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, let’s take the lessons that come out of this and use them to survive – even thrive – in the face of economic disruption.

If you look at the new way of working, you will find leading-edge organizations were already doing things that way: the ones who embraced and leveraged intelligent automation technologies. Here’s some of the automation-fueled changes that will help you to get through the current disruption and come out stronger on the other side:

The funny thing is that after a year of being forced to do things virtually as much as possible, we can see that some things actually work better that way. The key is to figure out which processes are best offered online, in-person or a combination of the two.

There are many examples of technology-enabled “better ways” that have emerged, both in the creation of physical goods and in knowledge-based work.

Consider real estate:
Sandy Kemsley's Blog - Not the New Normal for Mortgage Lending

I bought a new home in late 2020, and the transaction was completely contactless, using video calls with my lawyer, digital signatures on documents, online banking transactions, and exchange of keys using a lockbox. Having done transactions like this in the past that required multiple visits to the lawyer’s office and the bank, and signing documents in triplicate, my immediate thought was that I never want to go back to the old way of doing this.

Real estate-related financial services, such as mortgage origination, have undergone significant changes to be able to serve this transaction model. A borrower’s financial situation can change in the weeks that it takes to close a deal, requiring underwriting to gather information in real time and assess the impact of changes as deadlines approach. There are new guidelines and regulations to be applied, and no financial institution wants to risk being out of compliance or underwriting a potentially bad loan.

Given the more complex environment, the only practical way to handle mortgage origination is to add some level of intelligent process and decision automation. This does not mean that origination will be completely automated: underwriters will still need to review information and make decisions that can’t be automated, but they will have access to all of the up-to-date information and be guided by best practices to ensure compliance and reduce risk. Adding process and decision automation would mean that loans approved by an underwriter that don’t meet compliance or risk rules would be routed for more senior review before final approval.

Lenders that don’t adopt intelligent automation in their origination processes will greatly increase their risk, and incur higher costs as highly-skilled underwriters spend their time collecting information rather than considering decisions. And if they’re not offering the full digital lending experience, they will lose out on an increasing amount of business as more consumers decide, like I did, that they just don’t want to do it the old way.

Follow Sandy on her personal blog Column 2.

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Bruce Silver's Blog - Use Contexts to Simplify Your Decision Models
Bruce Silver
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Use Contexts to Simplify Your Decision Models

By Bruce Silver

Contributed on January 28, 2020

Read Time: 9 Minutes

Last time I showed the value of Business Knowledge Models (BKMs), those misunderstood and often-maligned elements in DMN diagrams.  In this post I’m going to try to do the same for contexts, another DMN feature that is similarly underappreciated and frequently disparaged by tool vendors that don’t support them.

Unlike BKMs, contexts are not DRG elements, meaning distinct shapes in the DRD.  Instead, a context is a type of boxed expression, a standard tabular format for the decision logic of a decision or BKM.  Contexts provide three essential benefits:

  1. They simplify complex decision models, providing a compromise between models with simple-looking DRDs containing complicated literal expressions and DRDs containing many decisions, each with simple decision logic.
  2. They allow you to model complicated decision logic – even a whole DRD – as a single value expression.  This is critical if you want to encapsulate that logic in a BKM.
  3. They allow you to construct structured data out of simple values.

We’ll illustrate all of these in this post.

Even though contexts are primarily about managing complexity, we will illustrate their use with something simple, the same example we used last time: calculating the monthly payment for a home mortgage.  As before, typically this would be just a small part of some larger end-to-end decision.

When you shop for a mortgage, it is common to see loan products specified as a combination of the annual interest rate, an origination fee called “points”, and possibly additional fixed fees.  Points are a percentage of the requested loan amount that is paid up front.  Typically the points and fees are simply added to the requested amount and paid off over time along with the rest of the loan.

Even something as basic as this can be modeled in a variety of styles, according to the tastes and skills of the modeler.  For example, James is a business analyst who likes the DRD to break down the logic into lots of simple decisions.  He modeled the mortgage payment logic like this:

Each element in James’s model has a very simple value expression but it requires four decisions, plus a BKM payment for the amortization formula.  Since this calculation represents only 5-10% of the expected end-to-end decision logic, that projects out to a complete DRD with dozens of elements.  That could be a problem, because beyond 20 or so elements in the DRD, the decision model becomes difficult to maintain.

Edson is another member of the team.  He’s more technical and prefers his logic to get right to the point.  He modeled the same scenario in a single literal expression:

Edson’s DRD has just a single decision node and no BKMs, but that literal expression has a lot going on.  If we were to model the end-to-end logic in this style, the DRD won’t have too many elements, but their decision logic likely will be too hard for most other stakeholders to understand… and too hard to debug, even for Edson.  Both versions of the logic give the same answer for Monthly Payment – $1427.16  but they represent an extreme difference in modeling style.

Contexts provide a compromise, a way to reduce the number of decision nodes in the DRD while making their decision logic easy to understand.  A context effectively collapses a DRD fragment into a single two-column table representing the entire value expression of a decision or BKM.  Each row of the table is called a context entry.  The first column is the name of the context entry, a variable used in the context’s logic. The second column is its value expression, usually a literal expression but possibly any other boxed expression, including decision table, invocation, or even another context.  The last row of the context has no name, just a value expression.  That is called the final result box, holding the value of the context as a whole.

Each context entry defines a local variable, meaning it can be referenced by subsequent context entries in the context and by the final result box, but not by expressions outside the context.  While they are not outputs of the overall decision logic, context entries allow the final result box logic to be simpler and easier to understand.

With Monthly Payment modeled as a context, the DRD still has just a single decision node, but its logic is now easier to understand.

The context breaks out the logic into five context entries, each with the simple decision logic favored by James.   It could have fewer context entries, of course, with slightly more complex literal expressions in some of them.  Note how, for example, the first context entry, Requested Amount, is referenced by the value expression of the second context entry, Points, and so on, continuing down to the final result box.

Also note that not all the value expressions are literal expressions.  Number 4, payment, is a rarely seen type called a function definition.  Normally a function definition is modeled as a BKM, but it can also be modeled as a context entry.  Here we use it in place of the BKM in James’s DRD.  Context entry 5, Monthly Payment Exact, is a boxed invocation calling the function payment described above.  It has many digits after the decimal point, so the final result box simply applies the function decimal() to it, rounding to two places.  Again the calculation gives the same result, $1427.16.

That illustrates the first benefit of contexts, simultaneously reducing the complexity of both the DRD and the decision logic of each node.

Now consider the scenario we discussed in last month’s post:  We have an input data table of bank loan products, each specified by Rate, PointsPct, and Fees, and would like to compare their respective Monthly Payments by Lender by iterating over the input table Loan Products.  That involves iterating a call to the BKM Table Row to generate each row of the of the output table, which simply lists the lender name and the monthly payment.  The latter is a call from Table Row to the BKM Monthly Payment.

In this example both Table Row and Monthly Payment are modeled as contexts, illustrating the second and third benefits of this expression type.  Table Row is a context with no final result box.  In that case the context output is a structure, with one component per context entry.  Its datatype tLenderPayment has two components, Lender (Text) and Payment (Number), and the context entries of Table Row reflect that.  In fact, this is the normal way to create structured data one component at a time.  Contexts with no final result box are especially useful when working with table data.  Here the context entry Payment is modeled as a boxed invocation of the BKM Monthly Payment.

The BKM Monthly Payment is a context with a final result box.  It looks the same as in the previous example, except now as a BKM it has parameters: Purchase Price, Down Payment, and Loan.  The context entry Payment in the BKM Table Row invokes this BKM.

Executing the model gives the results below:

This example illustrates the second and third benefits of a context.

  1. Since Monthly Payment is a BKM, it must be modeled as a single value expression, not a DRD fragment.  Contexts provide a way to reduce any decision logic, no matter how complex, to a single value expression.
  2. Creating the table Mortgage payments by Lender one row at a time uses a BKM modeled as a context with no final result box to construct each row.  The BKM Table Row is an example of that.

You might notice that this model is still not a single value expression, since it requires two BKMs in addition to the decision.  Could we do it all with just one decision and no BKMs?  With a context, we can! 

The trick is to turn the BKMs into function definition context entries, like this:

Here the context has two context entries, both modeled as function definitions, plus a final result box that iterates over Loan Products.  The context entry payment is just the amortization formula, formerly a BKM.  The context entry Table Row is also a function definition.  It includes a context entry contextRow modeled as a context with no final result box – so it creates the two-column structure.  Table Row also contains context entries not in the output that create local variables to simplify the decision logic.  Since we want Table Row to output only the two-column structure, its final result box just points to contextRow. This does the trick; now the whole logic is a single value expression!

Contexts should be a part of every DMN modeler’s arsenal of tools.   You can learn how to use them in my DMN Method and Style Advanced training.  It’s unfortunate that some vendors that claim DMN conformance do not support them.  Every year in the Revision Task Force they tell us, “Business users don’t like the tabular format; they like DRDs.”  But as in the case of BKMs, these vendors typically support only the decision requirements portion of DMN – the DRDs – and offload the decision logic portion to their proprietary rule language.  That violates the spirit of a decision language standard, and it’s unnecessary.

If your DMN tool vendor does not support contexts or BKMs, please urge them to do so!

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Bruce Silver's Blog - Helping the Mortgage Industry Go Digital
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Helping the Mortgage Industry Go Digital

By Bruce Silver

Read Time: 12 Minutes

Fannie Mae is one of two major Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) underpinning the residential mortgage market in the USA.  They supply liquidity to the system by purchasing mortgages from lenders and repackaging them as interest-paying securities sold to investors.  Without them, we wouldn’t have the low-rate long-term fixed rate loans that so many home buyers depend on.  Recently Fannie published a white paper titled “Without Data Standards, the Mortgage Industry Doesn’t Go Digital.”  The paper is meant as a wakeup call to mortgage industry participants, who have been notoriously slow to adopt digital transformation.  Unless they pick up the pace, warns Fannie, they risk being displaced by new fintech companies, who are already rapidly increasing their share of the mortgage business.

Their 2018 survey of lenders revealed the following leading challenges to adoption of new technology:

Fannie’s white paper focuses primarily on the data standards problem and points to recent gains in that area spurred by MISMO, the data standards arm of the US Mortgage Bankers Association.  These include a logical data model and XML schema for mortgage-related data elements.  MISMO data serves as the basis for things like the Uniform Mortgage Data Program and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, as well as the new Uniform Appraisal Dataset, which enables automated acceptance of appraisals in Fannie’s Uniform Collateral Data Portal.  Not discussed in the white paper, but nearly as important as standardizing the data, is MISMO’s recent adoption of BPMN and DMN standards for process and decision modeling.  BPMN allows the definition of new, more flexible processes.  DMN allows decision logic to be deployed as microservices behind REST APIs, emerging as the next-generation system/platform architecture.  Thus in combination, MISMO data, BPMN, and DMN address all three of the leading barriers to going digital.  In this post we’ll see how they can be used together.

It’s one thing for standards to exist or to be “adopted” by an industry association.  It’s quite another for the companies participating in the industry to actually incorporate those standards in their work.  As Fannie notes at the outset, lenders have been slow to break free of their legacy systems and replace them with new digital technology.  In my own interactions with these folks, for example, in MISMO’s Decision Modeling Community of Practice, I would say that the biggest obstacle is simply lack of awareness of how these new technology standards can be applied and work together.  That’s unfortunate, because MISMO data, BPMN, and DMN can be applied in digital mortgage apps today.

MISMO Data

Let’s start with MISMO data.  MISMO’s logical data model standardizes the names of data elements used in all aspects of the mortgage business – origination, servicing, securitization, etc.  This not only eliminates terminology differences between various lenders and systems, but prevents the same element having different names and attributes when used for different purposes across the enterprise.  There is great benefit in that, but the downside is that the resulting schema is huge, so XML data conforming to that schema can be difficult to access and manipulate.  MISMO is working on reducing that difficulty, but for the moment what we have is a mortgage data standard based on a large unwieldy schema.  Still, it’s a system-independent standard and we can work with it.

The key advantage of having such a standard is interoperability of mortgage data across participant systems.  For example, it has allowed Fannie and Freddie Mac, the other major GSE, to unify their loan application forms in a common Uniform Residential Loan Application, or URLA.  Each field in the form is linked to a MISMO data element, and Fannie and Freddie require that lenders deliver loans to them as MISMO-conformant XML.  That means lenders’ Loan Origination Systems must be capable of outputting loan application information as standard MISMO XML.  New applications and microservices can then make use of this data standard to streamline customer interactions.

Example: Loan Origination

For example, let’s suppose a lender wants to determine the maximum loan amount available to a prospective borrower consistent with the lender’s ability to sell the loan to Fannie.  With DMN you can model and execute that logic.  You can use BPMN to handle the mapping between MISMO data, URLA form data, and the DMN decision logic, and deploy the whole thing as a microservice.  And to top it off, with tools like Trisotech’s Digital Enterprise Suite, it can all be done by subject matter experts who are not programmers.  Let’s see how this works.

The details of Fannie’s Automated Underwriting System are undisclosed, but they publish them for Manual Underwriting, so we’ll use that for this example.  For simplicity, we will be concerned with 30-year fixed rate mortgages for purchase of a single-unit primary residence.  Fannie’s eligibility matrix is shown below:



We will assume the lender will approve the loan if it meets these eligibility requirements, which have four inputs: the credit score, the loan-to-value ratio (LTV), the debt-to-income ratio (DTI), and the borrower’s reserves, meaning liquid assets after closing, measured in months of housing expense payments.  We can turn this table into a DMN decision table by determining the minimum credit score required for a given combination of LTV, DTI, and Reserves.

DMN Solution


Values of LTV over 95%, DTI over 45%, or Reserves less than zero are always ineligible, so the minimum credit score for those is null.

Of course, LTV, DTI, and Reserves are derived values, not raw data reported in URLA.  As is usually the case, the bulk of the DMN Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD) is deriving those values from the input data, based on the calculations detailed in the Guide on Fannie’s website. That DRD is shown below:



The top-level decision Result simply consolidates reporting of various details of the loan application, including whether the loan is eligible nor not.  To assist lenders in implementing the URLA form and MISMO XML data standard, Fannie publishes some test cases, including the one for Ken Customer shown below:



This is just page 1 of Ken’s URLA form, which contains many pages detailing the various sources and types of his income, assets and liabilities, plus details of the loan, property value, and cash required at closing entered by the lender.  On delivery to Fannie, this data is formatted as MISMO XML.  Ken wants to borrow $300,000 for a $340,000 purchase, and we’ve assigned him a credit score of 660.



In this case, the minimum credit score is 680, so Ken is ineligible to borrow $300,000.  Of course, that’s not news.  Undoubtedly the lender’s Loan Origination System already knows this.

Max Loan Amount

But let’s say we want to be able to tell Ken the maximum loan amount he would be eligible for given his financial details.  That’s more difficult to model, since as the loan amount changes (here we assume the same purchase price), the LTV, DTI, and Reserves all change.  In fact, even the loan rate may change.  So for that we have the modified DRD shown below:



Now we’re going to vary the loan amount (LTV), and calculate an adjusted interest rate based on the lender’s daily best rate, LTV, and credit score.  With the resulting change in down payment and mortgage payment, the model will also recalculate DTI and Reserves.  In DMN, even though the logic is detailed, it does not require programming.  Using FEEL and boxed expressions, a subject matter expert can enter it directly.  For example, below is the decision Qualifying PITIA, Ken’s monthly housing expense payments:



We can test the logic by entering input data values in the form here on the left and running the model.  Recall that Ken did not qualify for 300,000, but for a loan amount of 272,000, corresponding to LTV of 80%, Ken’s credit score of 660 is equal to the required minimum, so he is eligible at this LTV.  Once testing gives confidence that the model is correct, it can be published in one click as an executable decision service we could call for any borrower given URLA and the current best interest rate.

Mapping the Data

As a practical matter, we need to take account of the fact that MISMO XML, because of its nature as an enterprise data dictionary, makes expressions referencing specific data elements more complicated than they need to be.  We’d like the format of our input data element URLA to be more DMN-friendly, simplifying those expressions.  Here you see a side-by-side comparison of a fragment of Ken’s data in the two formats:



As output by the Loan Origination System, Ken’s data is MISMO XML, so data mapping is required.  Trisotech automatically creates the corresponding FEEL datatypes when you import an XML Schema and provides a special system task, called Context Parser, to map XML data to its FEEL equivalent.  So our plan is to create a DMN-friendly XML Schema for the input data element URLA, map MISMO XML to that, pass that to the Context Parser, which then invokes the DMN.

BPMN Solution

We can model those steps as a process in BPMN and deploy the whole thing as a REST service that takes MISMO data as input and outputs the result of our decision.  It looks like this:



The first activity is a service that maps MISMO XML to our DMN-friendly schema.  You can write a program to do this, or use a tool like Altova MapForce to create the mapping graphically.  The output of that task, here called URLA DMN XML, is passed to the system task Context Parser, which converts the XML to FEEL.  The decision task Max Loan amount simply executes the DMN model we showed earlier, with its three input data elements URLA, LTV, and Best rate pct.  The DMN decision Result is passed to the process data output, which is also tested by a gateway to provide process end states Eligible and Ineligible.

We can deploy this BPMN process in one click as an executable microservice in the Trisotech cloud.  When we run it with an LTV of 80%, Ken is Eligible for the loan.  That’s the service output shown below on the left.  But if we bump it up just slightly to 81%, as shown on the right, the minimum credit score required jumps to 680 and Ken is Ineligible.  This slight increase in loan amount pushes DTI above 36% and also requires private mortgage insurance (PMI).  Thus we can report to Ken that the maximum he can borrow for this property is $272,000, or LTV 80%.



Executable Process Design without Programming

Executable modeling by non-programmers is a basic feature of DMN, but BPMN historically has required programming to make it executable.  Trisotech, however, has borrowed FEEL and boxed expressions from DMN to let non-programmers create executable processes like this one.  Just like invocation mappings in DMN, the tool provides boxed expressions to map between BPMN data objects (variables) and task data inputs/outputs.  For example, below you see the mapping from the process data objects LTV, URLA FEEL, and Best rate pct to the corresponding DMN input data elements.  In this case the mapping is trivial, but as in DMN, any FEEL expression can be used.



The Bottom Line

It’s a lot to process, but let’s review what we just showed:

  1. A DMN decision service, created by a subject matter expert – not a programmer – to determine loan eligibility per Fannie Mae manual underwriting rules (perhaps with modifications) based on URLA data.
  2. A mapping of URLA data from MISMO XML format to a more DMN-friendly format.  This could be created by a non-programmer using a third party graphical tool, or by a programmer as a reusable service.
  3. A BPMN process, also created by a non-programmer, to convert the MISMO data to DMN-friendly XML and then to FEEL, execute the DMN, and branch based on the decision result.

Assuming the lender’s LOS can output MISMO data, none of this depends on the details of the underlying systems.  It is all based on standards – for mortgage data (MISMO), decision logic (DMN), and executable processes (BPMN).  The whole thing can be packaged and deployed easily as a microservice, and it can be done by subject matter experts without programming.

The tools for the mortgage industry to go digital are here today.  Lenders should get to know them!

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From Business Rules to Decision Management using DMN


From Business Rules to Decision Management using DMN

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Business Composable Services for the Mortgage Industry

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Bruce Silver, Method and Style At bpmNEXT 2019

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Beyond Decision Models – Using Technical and Business Standards to Transform Financial Services

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Abstract

The financial services industry has long been a driver for technology innovation. Volatile regulations, increased demands for compliance, and a requirement for transparency necessitate the ability to quickly create and efficiently manage decisions. A key component will certainly be the ability to develop services or disseminate decisions in a consistent, unambiguous and transparent fashion. Reliance on traditional software platforms will not meet this need. Open, API-based architectures able to rapidly evolve and share are critical.

MISMO – the Mortgage Industry Standards and Maintenance Organization – recently announced the official recommendation for the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard for documentation, implementation, execution and exchange of business rules and decisions across the mortgage industry.

This presentation focuses on the integration of existing business data standards in the mortgage industry (MISMO) with technology standards (DMN, BPMN) to enable a powerful approach to handling Fintech and Regtech solutions. “Decisions as a Service” will become a primary delivery model to facilitate the creation and deployment of powerful APIs and microservices. Decisions enable a business-driven approach to develop and deploy the capabilities as services will allow consumers to get custom automation.

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Brian Stucky, CEO, DecisionX
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