75 retail stores, a centralized call center and the Internet. Each night the company processes thousands of transactions through a sophisticated system of business rules that account for taxes, manage discounts and promotions, and classifies types of purchases.
“This project has boosted the capabilities of Camping World as a business. We’ve enhanced our reporting, reduced our costs and improved our agility in responding to new membership programs and other business policies,” said John Lay, IT applications manager for Camping World. “ILOG’s technology was a key contributor to the new system. We chose to partner with ILOG, because of their tight integration with Visual Studio and native support for Microsoft Office applications.”
The rate of business changes at Camping World was accelerating and the company needed a streamlined method to manage them. New membership-based products required a sophisticated set of flexible business policies to appropriately manage the rules of the program and ensure precise execution of discounts to members. Camping World also plans to use a business rules-based process to consolidate sales processing into a single data store and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for reporting. By tracking, revising and managing business policies with ILOG’s Rules for .NET, Camping World made business policies easy to read, understand and change using common Microsoft Office® applications.
Previously, Camping World’s business policies were maintained in Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) software code, which had become increasingly complex and difficult to maintain over time. Changes in business policies required weeks of design, change and testing to ensure revisions to the software code did not impact mission-critical applications. Switching from COBOL to a Microsoft Visual Studio® environment with Rules for .NET eliminated the need to sort through thousands of lines of software code, and thoroughly design and test revisions to business policies prior to deployment.
ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make it one of the industry’s leading providers of business rule management systems (BRMS). Forrester Research has recognized ILOG as a resounding leader in business rules platforms, including the sole leader in rules platforms for .NET, a leader in business rule platforms for Java, for business analysts and for overall feature sets.
To learn more about ILOG’s BRMS products, visit www.ilog.com/products/businessrules.
posted By: Greg Gerber
