Business Process Integration-Oriented Application Integration (BPIOAI) IT 490 NJIT

BPIOAI Integrating applications through their business processes is arguably the most important of all the service based integration methodologies The goal is to create a single ‘logical’ model that spawns across multiple computing domains/systems that is linked through services and processes

BPIOAI BPIOAI is applicable across many types of problem domains: Customer services Manufacturing Financial transactions Human resources

BPIOAI BPIOAI consists primarily of the following elements: Graphic Modeling Tool – used to create the business model and define behavior Business Process Engine – integrates and controls the execution of the business processes through middleware Business Process Monitoring Interface – allows monitoring and control of the business processes

BPIOAI Elements Continued Business Process Engine Interface – Defines how applications will access the process engine through the use of integration technology (below) Integration Technology – a middleware product that is used to physically connect the business process applications to the engine Figure 3.2

Defining BPIOAI BPIOAI shares many of the traits of Service Oriented Integration (SOI) and Information Oriented Integration (IOI) In fact, BPIOAI may be used to integrate domains that have already been integrated using one of the other models BPIOAI simply adds another layer of overhead to existing integrated systems

An Example Let’s look at an example from the text – building a model plane. The steps involved include: Cutting out the parts Assembling the parts Painting the plane and attaching the decals

An Example We could further define the build steps in terms of processes: Cut parts Assembly Parts Finish Plane Since we’re automating/integrating the processes, they’ll run on a number of differing systems: Inventory (SAP) Sales (Custom) Manufacturing (Oracle)

An Example The process to ‘Cut Parts’ begins when a sales event is generated and posted from the sales system to the manufacturing system Once the parts have been cut, manufacturing is notified that the process is complete, which causes it to generate a process to assemble the parts Manufacturing does the same thing once assembly has completed by triggering a message to finish the parts

An Example When finishing is complete, the inventory system is updated to reflect the new inventory values and the sales system is updated with the finished status of the product and the fact that it is ready for shipping The critical element in this mix is that high level processes drive lower level processes and facilitate the exchange of information between systems

Back to BPIOAI When integration using BPIOAI, it becomes crucial to have a common process model across all systems that make up the problem domain The model must understand the events that are occurring and take into account both success and failure states of likely transactions

BPIOAI A common process model also provides many advantages including: Modeling Monitoring Optimization Abstraction

Processes When performing integration, processes tend to fall into 3 categories: Internal – existing at the corporation level, these process are within the organization and not visible to those outside the domain Shared – processes that are used to facilitate data exchange between more than one corporation/company (visible processes) Specialized – generally applicable only to the interactions between two companies and of limited scope More examples on pages 66-7

Standards BPIOAI is not something that we need to create from scratch. Several standards exist to help us along in the process: RosettaNet – process oriented standard that defines business process flows as Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) between trading partners ebXML – Electronic Business Extensible Markup Language is a joint venture between the UN Body for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)

Standards More standards: BPML – Business Process Modeling Language is a meta language for describing business processes