The platform is comprised of multiple processing engines. These engines have distinct responsibilities with respect to system processing and consequently they expose different API interfaces to the Business Rules they call. This section provides a brief overview of each engine in the platform and describes the engine’s core responsibilities.
Workflow Engine
The Workflow Engine is thought of as the controlling engine or the puppeteer. The main responsibility of this engine is to control and track the status of the business processes defined in the Workflow hierarchies. This engine is primarily accessed through the BRApi and can be called from other engines in order to check Workflow status during process execution. The Workflow Engine provides a very rich event model allowing each Workflow process to be evaluated and reinforced with customer specific business logic if required (see Appendix 2: Event Listing).
Stage Engine
The Stage Engine performs the task of sourcing and transforming external data into valid analytic data points. The main responsibility of this engine is to read source data (files or systems) and parse the information into a tabular format. This allows the data to be transformed or mapped to valid Members defined by the Finance Engine. The Stage Engine is an in-memory, multi-threaded engine that provides the opportunity to interact with source data as it is being parsed and transformed. In addition to parsing and transforming data, the Stage Engine also has a sophisticated calculation that enables data to be derived and evaluated based on incoming source data. The Stage Engine provides quality services to source data by validating, mapping, and executing Derivative Check Rules.
Finance Engine
The Finance Engine is an in-memory financial analytic engine. The main responsibility of this engine is to enrich and aggregate base data cells into consolidated multi-Dimensional information. The Finance Engine provides the opportunity to define sophisticated financial calculations through centralized Business Rules as well as member specific Business Rules (Member Formulas). It works concurrently with the Stage Engine to validate incoming intersections and works with the Data Quality Engine to execute Confirmation Rules which are used to validate analytic data values.
Data Quality Engine
The Data Quality Engine is responsible for controlling data confirmation and certification processes. This Confirmation Engine is used to define and control the sequence of data value checks required to assert the information submitted from a source system is correct. The Certification Engine is responsible for managing user certifications and determining the Workflow dependents’ completion status. This engine is primarily accessed through the BRApi and may be called from other engines in order to check data quality status during process execution.
Data Management Engine
The Data Management Engine provides task automation services to the platform. This engine executes batches of commands that are organized into sequences which contain steps. Steps represent entry points or mechanisms to execute features of other engines. For example, the Clear Data Step uses the services of the Finance Engine. In addition, the Data Management Engine can execute a Business Rule Step which executes a custom Business Rule as part of a Data Management Sequence. This is an incredibly powerful capability because it provides the ability to string together any combination of predefined processing steps with custom Business Rule steps.
Presentation Engine
The Presentation Engine provides extensive data visualization services to the Platform. The Presentation Engine is made up of the following component engines: Cube View Engine, Dashboard Engine, Parameter Engine, Book Engine and Extensible Document Engine. The Presentation Engine is responsible for managing and delivering content to the end user as well as providing a development environment for custom user interface elements. This engine enables the MarketPlace application development capabilities and continues to evolve with each product release. Like the Data Management Engine, the Presentation Engine interacts with and can call the services of all other engines in the product.
Scaling Engine
This feature will be made available in a future release.
The Scaling Engine provides services that will determine whether the customer wants to Scale their Server Set or Database Elastic Pool on the Platform. This is only available to Cloud (Azure) and does not pertain to On-Premise solutions. For example, customer must be utilizing Azure Scale Set, and/or SQL Server Elastic Pool functionality. This provides the ability to create or delete a VM and/or increase/decrease database resources based on the logic that is designated in the System Extender Business Rules to meet the customer needs.
