Process Based Integration Approaches and Standards

Topic Areas 1. Business Process Management (BPM) 2. Business Process Modeling (BPMo) 3. Business Process Integration (BPI) 4. Business Process Automation (BPA) 5. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) 6. Web Service Orchestration (WSO)

What is a process

Sample Process Integration

1. Business Process Management BPM is related to the functions of: 1. Process Design 2. Process Execution 3. Process Monitoring BPM vs. BPR BPM does not have anything to do with Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). Actually, BPM and BPR follow opposite approaches to Process Changes: Incremental vs. holistic.

Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) 1. Process Design We Monitor the Design of Existing Processes We Simulate the Feasibility of New Processes

Business Process Management (BPM) 2. Process Execution It involves all the software, programming, documentation, and manual intervention necessary to execute the steps in a process. The Software involved is usually based on a graphical interface to facilitate this difficult task. Business rules and business rule engines are used to facilitate the capturing and execution of the business logic of the corporation.

Business Process Management (BPM) 3. Process Monitoring Tracking of individual processes Provision of statistics Successes, Failures, times elapsed, problem steps. Evaluation of State and generation of metadata For example for a customer order, we need to know if it has been received, processed, invoiced, inventoried, shipped etc.

BPM Vendors Appian Cordys Global360 HandySoft IBM (Appian, Cordys, EMC (ProActivity), Global360, HandySoft, IBM, IDS Scheer, Lombardi Software, Metastorm, Pegasystems, Savvion, Tibco Software and Ultimus)

2. Business Process Modeling Purpose: Exploring a need to change processes or identify issues to be corrected. We look at how processes should have looked.

Business Process Modeling Descriptive Part – what is happening Outlines what actually happens during a process. Describes what can be done to make it perform more effectively or efficiently. Prescriptive Part – what should happen Defines desired processes and how they should be performed Draw rules and guidelines which, if followed, would lead to the desired improved process Explanatory Part – why is it happening Provides explanations about the logical (business logic) basis of processes Provides and evaluates alternative process designs.

Business Process Modeling

Business Process Modeling Tools (They have community editions you can download) Open Source Tool

3. Business Process Integration It has a two-fold aim: Internal Processes Integration External Processes Integration

Business Process Integration Internal Processes Integration We try to formulate processes that span applications, data islands, departments, and geography within the organization. We try to avoid initiating a large number of individual processes in individual units and departments. We aim for reduction of duplicated processes which might lead to heterogeneous standards across units.

3. Business Process Integration

Business Process Integration External Processes Integration Integrate processes with suppliers, partners, and other entities to the external environment of the corporation.

Business Process Integration

4. Business Process Automation We define business process automation as the function of using technology components to substitute and/or supplement manual processes in the organization.

Business Process Automation Technology building blocks of a business process automation solution: 1. Business rule engine 2. Application integration platform 3. Workflow engine 4. Common data interchange standards

Business Process Automation 1. Business rule engine In IT applications business rules change much more frequently than the rest of the code. Business rules describe the structure, operation, and strategy of an organization's business process. A few key people in the organization define and enforce business rules, typically captured in policies and organizational procedures. They can be found in manuals, customer contracts, supplier agreements, etc. In legacy environments and other old fashioned systems, business rules were encoded inside the application. This can be expensive and difficult to change. A business rule engine let us separate application code from business logic.

Business Rule Engine Source: IBM

Examples of Business Rules Engines Oracle Business Rules InRule NxBRE (Open Source)

Business Process Automation 2. Application integration platform  Process automation means that manual processes will be substituted from system processes.  Systems (i.e. applications) that support a business process should seamlessly communicate and exchange information without manual intervention.  That calls for a strong application-integration platform that supports multiple communication protocols and data exchange among systems.

Business Process Automation  3. Workflow engine and automation  Definition: The computerized facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or part. (Workflow management coalition)  Workflow automation is purely a software technology which provides a means of automating a business process.  Workflow Automation also concentrates on reducing the lag time in manual interventions in business processes.  Organizations can automate business processes using workflow automation software without re-engineering.  Organizations can re-engineer without any workflow automation.

Business Process Automation 4. Common data interchange standard  Enterprises need a common data interchange standard, usually XML-based, that reduces development and maintenance efforts.

EDI vs. XML Messages EDI Sample Purchase Order

EDI vs. XML Messages EDI Message Sample XML Purchase Order

5. Business Activity Monitoring BAM uses dashboards to present key performance indicators (KPI). It is a term promoted by the Gartner Group (Consulting and Research company It is practically a report tool. Provides real time summaries of business activities (as outcomes from processes) to management. It also provides alerts to managers automatically from operational data.

6. Web Service Orchestration (WSO) WSO provides process-level integration in web services. We will discuss this topic when we discuss SOA so that we understand it in its context. Thematically though it belongs here.