Decision and business rules have evolved over the years in SAP. With each platform, the business rules technology also evolved with time.
We now know that the rule engine is available in ABAP as BRFplus, in SAP HANA as the SAP HANA rules framework, in Java as SAP Business Process Management, and in the cloud as SAP Build Process Automation. With more and more organizations having a hybrid landscape with business solutions spanning on-premises, cloud, SAP, and non-SAP systems, there was an increasing need to have a central business rules management solution where business users can manage rules from one single platform.
Central decision management is therefore one of the important aspects of the decision artifact in the SAP Build Process Automation service. With this functionality, decisions once modeled can be deployed in SAP BTP or SAP HANA, and then consumed in respective applications in these platforms.
In this post, we’ll cover the different runtimes where a decision artifact can be deployed.
When decisions are modeled and deployed in SAP Build Process Automation, the rules are deployed to the cloud runtime. The deployment involves publishing the decision model from the design phase to a runtime environment from where it can be executed. The most common runtime environment for decisions in SAP Build Process Automation is the cloud runtime. When a business process reaches a point where a decision needs to be executed, the system calls the deployed decisions model in the cloud, which is exposed via REST APIs. This figure shows the Determine Authorized Approvers decision artifact within a project named Invoice Approval that has been released and deployed multiple times.
To view the content of any deployed decision, you can click on the respective version and then navigate into the decision artifact. The view will open in read-only mode, as shown in this figure.
Here, you can see the actual rules that got deployed and get information about decision metadata such as the decision ID and version (see figure below).
After deployment, the business rules or decisions can be consumed using a REST-based API. The API to invoke a rule service has been documented in SAP Business Accelerator Hub, as shown in this figure.
The power of a decision is the openness that it brings with the REST-based API. Once deployed, it can be consumed from any application in on-premise, cloud, SAP, or non-SAP systems. Following the lifecycle of the business project, decisions can be versioned any number of times. Each decision version can be deployed in SAP BTP. It’s possible to consume any specific version of a decision via the API. If no version details are provided while triggering the API, then the latest version will be called during runtime execution.
There are various styles of contemplating decisions. Analytical decision-making is one such form where important business decisions are made based on the large set of historical data. SAP HANA is an in-memory data platform supporting both analytical and operational processing, including transactional support—and mixes of these as well—to meet a wide range of requirements.
Besides the database capabilities, SAP HANA has many extra features, such as predictive analytics, text search and mining, and so on. SAP HANA is now the database of choice for most of the SAP lines of business (LoB) solutions. To support deployment of decisions into SAP HANA, SAP Build Process Automation supports creation of SQL scripts based on the decisions modeled. Because this isn’t a common scenario, the capability can only be accessed via APIs.
The next figure shows an API called from a REST client to generate an SQL script that can then be run in SAP HANA to create a SQL procedure with defined inputs and outputs.
The SQL procedure can be executed directly in an SAP HANA database to perform the rule execution. Right-click on the procedure, and choose Execute. It can also be triggered from any application using the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) programming interfaces.
Business rules in SAP Workflow Management support the deployment of a business rule as a BRFplus rule in a connected ABAP system. This feature is no longer available in the decisions capability of SAP Build Process Automation. However, the business rules within SAP Build Process Automation still supports the deployment into an ABAP environment. This converts the rules into an executable function module in ABAP like the behavior of BRFplus.
SAP Build Process Automation brings together years of evolution in SAP’s decision and business rules technologies into one unified platform. By supporting multiple runtimes—from cloud-based REST APIs to SAP HANA SQL procedures and ABAP function modules—it allows organizations to deploy and manage decisions wherever they’re needed most. Whether your landscape spans on-premise and cloud systems or SAP and non-SAP applications, SAP Build Process Automation provides the flexibility and centralization needed to keep decision logic consistent, transparent, and accessible across your entire enterprise.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Build Process Automation: The Comprehensive Guide by Steven Jacobson, Chaitanya Priya Puvvada, Seshadri Sreenivas Ramanarayanan, Stephan Schluchter, and Archana Shukla. Steven is a product manager at SAP who has in-depth knowledge of and expertise with SAP Build Process Automation. Chaitanya is a senior product manager in the human capital management domain with SAP SuccessFactors. Seshadri is a senior product manager for SAP Build Process Automation at SAP. Schluchter is a product manager for SAP Build. Archana is a senior director of product management at SAP.
This post was originally published 10/2025.