Business rules provide custom validation logic for objects in a product or library. The rules determine if an object is eligible to go through defined checkpoints in the change management or promotion process and provide results of the evaluation as feedback to the user.

The goal of business rules is to automate the validation and feedback of conditions that must be met throughout a process. This validation can be checking to see that data meets requirements of the business during a change process.

For example, a business rule can validate that the attributes of a part are acceptable for release, or the children of a CAD document are at an appropriate state to release the parent. The business rules framework provides the ability to define and execute the rules through configuration and provide process feedback. The end result is reduction of manual work to validate business data and errors in the enterprise due to incorrect information.

Depending on the context, the Business Rules page displays two tables:

Since business rule sets support context hierarchal lookup, all business rules sets from the context and higher are shown in the table. For example, there is a default business rule set named “ChangeablePreRelease.” This rule set is loaded at the site context. Another business rule set with the same name is loaded at the organization context.

If you are viewing the business rule sets from the site context, you see only the ChangeablePreRelease rule set for the site context and associated rules. If you are viewing the business rule sets from organization context, then both the site and organization ChangeablePreRelease business rule sets are shown with the associated business rules.

For more information, see Rule Set Hierarchy.

The Association Rules table is available under the site and organization contexts.

You can use change associations to configure relationships between change objects. For example, you can configure the relationship between a manufacturing change notice to an engineering change notice, a problem report to a change notice, or an item-specific change request to a block change request.

These rules determine which objects can be linked in the Associated Process Objects, Associated Reference Objects, and Implementation Plan tables.

For information on creating and managing association rules, see Association Rule Administration.