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I had two hours to prove a point. So I built a game.

A woman seen from behind swings her leg back to take a penalty on the carpet of an empty office room. A colleague in goalkeeper gloves waits between two coat stands, a necktie hanging from one, while colleagues cheer on the left and Isard Haasakker cheers on the right, in late golden light.

You take the penalty. SAP is the goalkeeper.

BRF+ is unknown and unloved. If you want to use it, someone has to say yes. And decision makers don’t say yes to a slide about decision tables.

Seeing is believing. So I opened a sandbox and built something everybody in the room could understand, whatever their module. Not a finance demo for logistics consultants. Not a logistics demo for finance. A penalty shoot-out.

Two hours later it was working. Which proved the second point: this doesn’t take forever.

How the game works

Player A takes the penalty. Player B controls the goalkeeper: where he prefers to dive. Whether it’s a goal is decided behind the scenes, at the moment the penalty is taken.

Fix: the game logic is a handful of rules. Shot left, keeper dives left, saved.
Control: you decide whether the goalkeeper prefers to dive left.
Excel: export the goalkeeper’s decision table, change his behaviour in a spreadsheet, import it, and watch him dive the other way more often.
Clean: the game logic never changes. Only the rules do. Not a line of ABAP rewritten.

What you learn without noticing

As a player you only see the decision table. Behind it, BRF+ does a lot more to decide where the goalkeeper actually dives. Open it up and you can trace every step of that decision, much like debugging ABAP.

Swap in a completely different set of rules and you’ll find you don’t need to change a line of ABAP. And the goalkeeper’s personality lives in Excel, which surprises people more than it should.

That’s the core of BRF+. Everything else is the same idea, applied to pricing, approvals, validations and the rules your business actually runs on.

Isard Haasakker faces the viewer with a football under one arm and a knowing grin, the empty room behind him with its two coat stands, a necktie hanging from one.

Your two hours

Functional consultants who want to own their rules. Developers who want to see what their code will be asked. Project managers who used to build things and miss it. If you’ve ever said “I’d love to get my hands on the system again”, these are your two hours.

Getting from a goalkeeper to your own business rules takes a little imagination. Change a spreadsheet, and he dives the other way. That’s the point. Once you’ve watched a goalkeeper change his mind without a line of ABAP, you start seeing decision tables everywhere.