Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Paul Browne (GBP), PORCELLI

Overview of this book

Microsoft Excel is widely adopted across diverse industries, but Excel Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets. They need a better enterprise-level solution, and this book introduces Business rules combined with the power of AI to tackle the limitations of Excel. This guide will give you a roadmap to link KIE (an industry-standard open-source application) to Microsoft’s business process automation tools, such as Power Automate, Power Query, Office Script, Forms, VBA, Script Lab, and GitHub. You’ll dive into the graphical Decision Modeling standard including decision tables, FEEL expressions, and advanced business rule editing and testing. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to share your business knowledge as graphical models, deploy and execute these models in the cloud (with Azure and OpenShift), link them back to Excel, and then execute them as an end-to-end solution removing human intervention. You’ll be equipped to solve your Excel queries and start using the next generation of Microsoft Office tools.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:The Problem with Excel, and Why Rule-Based AI Can Be the Solution
5
Part 2: Writing Business Rules and Decision Models – with Real-Life Examples
9
Part 3: Extending Excel, Decision Models, and Business Process Automation into a Complete Enterprise Solution
13
Part 4: Next Steps in AI, Machine Learning, and Rule Engines
Appendix A - Introduction to Visual Basic for Applications

A quick look at Kogito business automation

Way back in Chapter 3, we glimpsed the option to create a workflow in Figure 3.1. At the time, we focused on creating a decision service, but it might be worth going back to that screen and creating the sample workflow, as in Figure 8.33:

Figure 8.33 – Kogito business automation sample

Figure 8.33 – Kogito business automation sample

Since this workflow example is graphical, it is very easy to follow that it is dealing with business traveler reservations. Even better, since it is part of Kogito, the Process Traveler step integrates business rules seamlessly into the workflow. As you’d expect, the Kogito tooling follows industry standards – so you can use Kogito to develop process services using BPMN.

However, while a Kogito workflow is business user-friendly, the tooling is not (yet) as standalone as the business rules and decision services. For example, there are more limited options to execute a Kogito workflow process in the KIE sandbox...