Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By : Paul Browne
Book Image

AI and Business Rule Engines for Excel Power Users

By: Paul Browne

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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

What is a workflow?

Every company follows a workflow, even if those steps might be manual. Figure 8.1 gives a sample workflow that our chocolate shop might follow in responding to customers:

Figure 8.1 – Sample customer service workflow

Figure 8.1 – Sample customer service workflow

This workflow is pretty simple – take a customer call, look up previous details, use that knowledge to make a product recommendation, then share that recommendation with the customer. You’ve probably written or followed workflows that are much more complex, but the basic building blocks remain the same:

  • Interaction with external actors – in this case, a call from the customer triggers the start of the workflow, and an email from us to the customer completes it.
  • Reading and writing from internal systems – for example, noting the question asked, and looking up the customer details in our system.
  • Making a decision – in this case, recommending the best product (including...