2 ms·

I wrote a spreadsheet based rules engine at Honeywell in around 2003 which enabled the business to maintain the business rules for all sales contracts that ran

I wrote a spreadsheet based rules engine at Honeywell in around 2003 which enabled the business to maintain the business rules for all sales contracts that ran through the automation and control systems division. This gave them the ability to define forms, subsets of forms (legal or otherwise), notifications and approvals. I had its own natural language based expression language which the super users and business analysts could easily understand. The spreadsheets, were change controlled by the business an imported into the system when they were approved. I considered this design a form of a visual language and the real beauty was that it did not require any re-coding of business rules, which did change quite frequently. The developers did not have to be re-writing any business logic as the rules changed. The back end was Java and TCL based built on a graph database. Not super fast but super easy to understand and train up new developers. It was quite successful and ran all sales contracts for for several years with billions of dollars of contracts passing through per year. I lost contact with the teams so I'm not sure how long it survived but I know that SAP charged millions of dollars trying to build a solution in their systems but could not get one working at a reasonable price.

cruise9 5y ago
I'd love to hear how you integrated a Java and TCL backend with spreadsheets. I'm assuming this isn't something you can do with excel? (Logistics at the small business I work at, is run on a mess of excel spreadsheets with complicated formulas and occasionally VBA for some email functionality. I have a feeling we're doing things horribly wrong, but I don't know of any better way to do things with our zero IT budget.)
- Timothycquinn 5y ago
  I did not leverage any VBA or VB. I learned to code in VBA and written way too much code in that space and was well aware of the limitations. I'm pretty sure the way it went was, on check-in of a new version, I had a Java program that read the spreadsheet validated that all the right sheets were there and that the columns on each sheet conformed with the spec and also validated rows of data. The sheets were translated on each front end node for easy access. Regarding the expression engine, the the expressions themselves were then translated into TCL boolean expressions. The attributes for the related objects where already loaded into memory into dictionaries and then the expressions were just evaluated to get a boolean result.
meesterdude 5y ago
Neat! Seems like what's old is new again. I'm up to the same shenanigans (sans java, TCL and a graph database). spreadsheets are a great medium to provide non-technical people access to adjusting production with nuanced precision.
- Timothycquinn 5y ago
  Agreed. I was amazed to see how much coding time is wasted by people trying to do some data cleanup job when it can be done so much easier and safer with no coding by: 1) Exporting he data to a spreadsheet 2) Massaging the data in the spreadsheet 3) Use a general purpose program to convert the spreadsheet into scripts that can be run against the DB. I actually wrote a VBA program that does this where you have a query with ~1, ~2, ~3 macros and you just paste in a table, click a button and it spits out scripts for you. I wrote it 20 years ago and still use it to this day.

cruise9 5y ago

I'd love to hear how you integrated a Java and TCL backend with spreadsheets. I'm assuming this isn't something you can do with excel? (Logistics at the small business I work at, is run on a mess of excel spreadsheets with complicated formulas and occasionally VBA for some email functionality. I have a feeling we're doing things horribly wrong, but I don't know of any better way to do things with our zero IT budget.)

Timothycquinn 5y ago
I did not leverage any VBA or VB. I learned to code in VBA and written way too much code in that space and was well aware of the limitations. I'm pretty sure the way it went was, on check-in of a new version, I had a Java program that read the spreadsheet validated that all the right sheets were there and that the columns on each sheet conformed with the spec and also validated rows of data. The sheets were translated on each front end node for easy access. Regarding the expression engine, the the expressions themselves were then translated into TCL boolean expressions. The attributes for the related objects where already loaded into memory into dictionaries and then the expressions were just evaluated to get a boolean result.

meesterdude 5y ago

Neat! Seems like what's old is new again. I'm up to the same shenanigans (sans java, TCL and a graph database). spreadsheets are a great medium to provide non-technical people access to adjusting production with nuanced precision.

Timothycquinn 5y ago
Agreed. I was amazed to see how much coding time is wasted by people trying to do some data cleanup job when it can be done so much easier and safer with no coding by: 1) Exporting he data to a spreadsheet 2) Massaging the data in the spreadsheet 3) Use a general purpose program to convert the spreadsheet into scripts that can be run against the DB. I actually wrote a VBA program that does this where you have a query with ~1, ~2, ~3 macros and you just paste in a table, click a button and it spits out scripts for you. I wrote it 20 years ago and still use it to this day.