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Power Users often encounter limitations such as complex formulas, obscure business knowledge, and errors from using outdated sheets.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

A safer Decision Table example

While our Decision model is very powerful, in its current form, it’s very dangerous. It recommends milk-based products to lactose-intolerant customers. Even worse, it could be recommending products with nuts to people with severe allergies.

We need to fix this. Our first thought is to update the Product Recommendation decision table. It is possible to write our rules to do this but it is also very likely that such an important decision will somehow get lost in all the rules we are writing. If not now, somebody in the future could forget this important rule with potentially fatal consequences.

Far better to chain our decision nodes to highlight in our Decision Model how important this health check rule is. Figure 4.25 is an example of how we could design this:

Figure 4.25 – A safer product recommendation service

Figure 4.25 – A safer product recommendation service

This model is downloadable as 04_Product_Recommendation-collect.dmn but is simple to recreate...