OpenRules has been successfully applied as a foundation for real-world Decision Management Systems. OpenRules covers all major phases of the Business Rules and Decision Management from modeling to testing and execution.

Goal-Oriented Decision Modeling
OpenRules® supports a goal-oriented approach to decision modeling. This approach aims to creation of complex decision models  that cover certain business domains and capable to reach not just one but multiple business goals by providing answers to various questions in terms of automatically calculated decision variables. Such decision models can be designed by defining hierarchies of business goals and subgoals with relationships between them described in business-friendly decision tables. Without asking a human decision modeler to specify knowledge and information relationships within the model, the OpenRules Engine can automatically calculate an execution path within the decision model that leads to any business goal selected by a user.

Watch these videos that explain the OpenRules methodological approach:
- Building and Executing Decision Models with OpenRules-7
- Goal-Oriented Business Decision Modeling with OpenRules. 
 
OpenRules also supports the OMG standard "Decision Model and Notation (DMN) and  a methodological approach described in the popular book "The Decision Model".

OpenRules supports cooperative work between Business and Technical Analysts, providing business people with control over the business logic. In contrast with most commercial rule engines that provide an Excel-like graphical tool for Rules and Decision Management, OpenRules uses MS Excel^® or Google Sheets^® directly as rules editing tools.  OpenRules allows both business and technical people to accomplish rule and decision modeling, automation, testing, and integration using only popular and commonly known tools. 

Without any coding, business analysts can create test cases in Excel and can actually EXECUTE their decisions in order to TEST if the expected results are being produced.  OpenRules generates HTML-reports that explain why certain decisions were made. OpenRules provides a graphical “Decision Model Analyzer” freely available online from here. Its main purpose is to allow a business user to execute and analyze predefined decision models and to allow business people to add, execute, and analyze their own models.

Being integrated with Google Sheets^®, OpenRules supports collaborative rules and decision management. The use of standard tools gives our customers easy access to very powerful features including editing, searching, discussing, and integration capabilities.

The distinctive feature of OpenRules is that "everything is real".  There are no documents for the sake of documents. Decision models are "executable" and can be tested at any stage of the decision management process.

 IT specialists can easily integrate decision models created by business analysts into their existing applications by mapping business glossaries and business object models without any changes in the business logic. Business Rule and Decisions administrators can use the standard MS Excel protection mechanism to provide different groups of people with proper access rights to the rule repository. Both technical and non-technical users will appreciate the power of the Excel-Java combination supported by OpenRules.

By providing support of Rules-based Web Dialogs, OpenRules expands the BR approach by giving business people control over the presentation logic as well.  You can model your rules-based business process using Excel as a powerful web form management tool. With OpenRules libraries, you can define layouts of your web pages and relationships among them directly in Excel. A non-technical user can implement dynamic web-based graphical interfaces without any knowledge of HTML, JScript, PHP, JSP, or other popular web development technologies. You can also add decision tables to control complex interaction logic.  In this way Excel can be used to model and execute dynamic web-based interaction processes. 

OpenRules approach uses open source Eclipse, the de-facto standard project management tool for software developers, as a powerful IDE for rule integration within a Java-based development environment. Complex Java projects with extensive rules components can be organized and maintained under Eclipse with the OpenRules Plugin.  Eclipse naturally provides a powerful version control mechanism for Excel-based rules and related source code files. Eclipse is used for code editing, debugging, and testing of rule projects. With OpenRules Plugin business rules can be deployed as a Web Application or a Web Service and can be integrated with any Java or .NET applications.

Note. Does the use of MS Excel mean you are doomed to use MS Windows only? Not at all!
You do not need Excel to run(!) OpenRules-based decisions. For example, your Java-based application can run under Unix or Mac OS using xls-files as regular data files. Additionally, one may prefer to use OpenOffice or Google Docs to create and edit xls-files rather than MS Excel.