[citation needed] For example, a business rule might state that no credit check is to be performed on return customers.
[citation needed] When carefully managed, rules can be used to help the organization to better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.
[citation needed] Organizations may choose to proactively describe their business practices, producing a database of rules.
For example, they might hire a consultant to comb through the organization to document and consolidate the various standards and methods currently in practice.
The business analyst or consultant can extract the rules from IT documentation (like use cases, specifications or system code).
[citation needed] More commonly, business rules are discovered and documented informally during the initial stages of a project.
This methodology defines a process of capturing business rules in natural language, in a verifiable and understandable way.
Facts can be documented as natural language sentences or as relationships, attributes, and generalization structures in a graphical model.
Every enterprise constrains behavior in some way, and this is closely related to constraints on what data may or may not be updated.
[citation needed] While newer software tools are able to combine business rule management and execution, it is important to realize that these two ideas are distinct, and each provides value that is different from the other.