As the value of the day to day decisions grow, the importance of Decision Management Solution deployment becomes undoubted. Organizations adopting Decision Management improve business results by supporting, automating and improving operational decisions. Understanding this a lot of vendors are coming to market with their brand-new solutions. How not to get lost in the variety of options and choose the right solution for you?

Based on our experience we have created our own list of decision management solution must-have features. Let’s discuss 7 of them that we consider the most important.

1. Visual interface for decision flow creation

If you cannot afford spending weeks or even months learning new tool or studying tricky programming language this should be the feature you check first. Does it involve coding? Do you need to use any specific syntax to design a process? How long doest it take for you as a new user to learn how to use it? Answering these questions will help you to choose the solution that saves your time and money.  

2. Flexible management of multiple decision flows

 Needless to say that environment is changing faster from year to year. In such conditions wins the one who adapts better. If you don’t see yourself using one decision flow for all your operations forever you have to consider system’s management capabilities. Does the system allow creating multiple strategies and using them simultaneously? Is the “champion/challenger” mode supported? How easy and intuitive is the interface for decision flows management? Does it allow analyzing the effectiveness of the decision flows you use? Having all of these features on board you are well prepared for any changes.

3. Ability to use data from external data sources or other systems

Nowadays market offers a wide variety of information helping lenders to increase the accuracy of their decisions. Why not combine it with your entire decision flow? In this regard make sure that the system or vendor you choose is flexible for integration with 3rd party software and data providers.

4. Ability to include scoring models to the decision flows

 Effectiveness of your decision flow strongly depends on how you combine proven business rules with the intelligence of statistical scorecards. Ability to easily integrate scorecards to your decision flows, calibrate and update them is the must for the decision management solution to be used in the lending business. Does the system allow integrating scorecards through the standard user interface? Do you need any IT department or 3rd party vendor’s efforts to implement scorecard? Does the system allow integrating multiple scorecards and using them depending on certain conditions? What are the scorecard management interface’s capabilities? Make sure your system supports these features to get maximum benefit from you scoring models.

5. Ability to build scorecards in-house

 Many words are said about the importance of in-house scorecards over generic ones. Here we won’t explain you why in-house scorecards are better. We’ll just discuss how it interferes with your decision management solution. There are a lot of standalone statistical software applications available on the market. You can compare their pro’s and con’s forever; almost each of them is good for some particular reason. But if talking about decision support for lending business, you don’t need dozens of those tricky statistical features provided by universal statistical software. At the same time you need more sophisticated business logics optimized for lending. In this regard statistical software provided within specialized banking software suites will be much more helpful. Additionally such suites usually provide better compatibility between the components.

6. Organic combination of automated actions and expert decisions

 It is of great importance that the decision management system provides the utmost automations to support lending decisions. But “to support” is the key point. If you don’t want to totally eliminate human role in your decision making process pay attention at this side of the solution. How sophisticated are user workplaces? Do they provide enough information to make a grounded decision? What are the decision override capabilities? Choose the solution that helps you make a decision and doesn’t make it for you.

7. Ability to flexibly define connections between different participants of the decision making process

 Not all of decisions can be made by one person. Different people in different departments within the organization may take part in the decision making process. In more complicated cases the decision may go through several cycles among the same range of people. Can you imagine what a mess it can be if managed manually? This is especially true in large institutions. That is why you have to make sure that the system you are going to purchase will be able to take this headache away.

Certainly, this list can be much longer. Choosing decision management system is a long and important process. Each of you can add a lot of items that will be important for your organization. However, these are the good points to start.