What we've learnt from experience about jBPM3 is that a rule engine can become very handy when evaluating different situations and making automatic decisions based on the information available. Based on my experience in consulting, I've noticed that people who understand how a process engine works and feel comfortable with it, start looking at rule engines such as Drools. The most intuitive first step is to delegate the business decisions in your processes and the data validations to a rule engine. In the past, adopting one of these two different technologies at the same time was difficult, mostly because of the learning curve as well as the maturity and investment required by a company to learn and use both technologies at once. At the end of the day, companies spend time and money to create in-house integrations and solutions so that they can merge these two worlds.
The following example shows what people have done with jBPM3 and the Drools Rule Engine:
The...