Business Process Management Using The Open-Source Toolset

Business Process Management using the Open-Source Toolset Open Source Series Workshop 2008 KICS, UET Adeel Javed Technical Lead | BPM Practice Techlogix Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

BPM Development Lifecycle

Intalio BPMS – Overview

Intalio BPMS – Model

Intalio BPMS – Design

Intalio BPMS – Deploy

Intalio BPMS – Execute

Intalio BPMS – Manage & Monitor

References

What is BPM (Business Process Management)?

Business Process: A business process represents a discrete series of activity or task steps that can span people, applications, business events and organizations.

Business Process Management: is the understanding, visibility and control of business processes.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Market Size / Growth Rates *CM, Portals, and EAI Figures from IDC Forecasts. Gartner US Software estimates for Real-Time Collaboration and Business Process Automation, Analytics, and Management Market Opportunity Worldwide 2006 Worldwide 2010 ECM & Portals $1.9 B $3.0 B Enterprise Application Integration $1.5 B $2.2 B Collaboration $1.1 B (US Only) $1.3 B (US Only) Business Process Management / Optimization $1.0 B $3.5 B

Reasons to do BPM

A few of the important reasons to BPM are:

Business Agility

Reduce process latency

Universal access to information

Eliminate wasted effort

Routing & communication

Improved information quality

Improved customer satisfaction

Process Enabled Compliance

Improved Cycle Times

Visibility and Control

What BPM delivers

BPM promises agility, flexibility and visibility into your process, by providing tools to model, automate and manage business processes. It provides:

Full task management of due and overdue tasks

Escalation for tasks behind schedule

Reassignment and delegation capabilities

Dashboards to see process metrics

Process steps which allow integrations with other systems

BPM is:

Better: Inherently aligned with business outcomes

Faster: Technology supports Delivery cycles in weeks, and if done right it can be 2-3 times faster as compared to traditional project methodologies

Cheaper: Short delivery cycles help in reducing cost

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Lifecycle of a BPM project is generally common regardless of the platform being used.

Therefore each platform has to provide some components that are required in a BPMS (Business Process Management Solution/Suite).

It is not necessary that each platform has same sort of architecture or technology stack, the basics only have to be same and the implementations can vary.

BPM Development Lifecycle – Discover Discover: Business Owners discover processes in their organizations that need to be improved and automated. Discover

BPM Development Lifecycle – Model Model: Process Analysts and Business Owners model a process. Discover Model

BPM Development Lifecycle – Design & Deploy Design & Deploy: Process Developers automate the process, deploy and test the solution. Discover Model Design Deploy

BPM Development Lifecycle – Execute & Interact Execute & Interact: End Users and Systems interact with the process. Discover Model Design Deploy Execute Interact

BPM Development Lifecycle – Analyse & Monitor Analyse & Monitor: Support Engineers manage the application and Business Owners monitor it’s performance using various reports. Discover Model Design Deploy Execute Interact Monitor Analyse

BPM Development Lifecycle – Optimize Optimize: After monitoring the process, Process Analysts and Business Owners improve and optimize it. And the entire process starts once again. Discover Model Design Deploy Execute Interact Monitor Analyse Optimize

BPMS Components

BPMS = Business Process Management Suite

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio BPMS is an open-source Business Process Management Suite currently being used by more than 250 organizations worldwide.

Intalio BPMS:

Is a standards based suite, it uses BPMN, BPEL 2.0, BPEL 4 People, WSDL, XForms, XSD and XPath.

It promotes Zero Code by providing a graphical user interface for business process development, the IDE is based on Eclipse framework.

Uses BPMN to reduce custom code, 1 BPMN box generates 10 lines of BPEL code which is equal to 100 lines of J2EE code.

Intalio BPMS – Platform Editions

Intalio BPMS – Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management of 2007 recognizes Intalio BPMS as one of the visionaries.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio provides the Intalio|BPMS Modeling view for Business Analysts and Process Analysts to model business processes without going into the actual IT details.

Intalio BPMS – Model Swim lanes: define people, roles, systems or departments involved and responsible for performing activities in the process e.g. this swim lane informs that a Candidate will be involved in Submit Application activity, a Candidate will receive rejection/acceptance notifications.

Intalio BPMS – Model Tasks: represent activities in a process, these could be human or system activities e.g. Submit Application will be a human activity and Notify about Rejection on the other hand is a system activity.

Intalio BPMS – Model Connectors: define sequence of different activities e.g. Receive Application will happen before Assign Application for Review.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio provides the Intalio|BPMS Designer view for IT personnel to fill in the technical details e.g. perform data flow/mapping in the process, associating UI with human tasks, invoking web services to interact with external systems etc.

Intalio provides the Intalio|Form Editor view for UI Designers to create UI’s for human tasks and notifications using XForms. It is a WYSIWYG editor, which provides a zero code environment. The UI after deployment does not change, it is exactly what you have developed in the editor.

Once the form has been designed it is attached to an activity in the process.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio provides a one-click deployment facility for processes from within the IDE.

Deployment: Click deployment button.

Select the resources you need to deploy and that’s it the application if it has no errors is deployed. No descriptors or xml configurations.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio provides a web-based portal for executing the deployed processes.

The portal by default provides role-base security i.e. only processes and tasks that a person is responsible for are made visible to him/her.

Processes tab displays a list of all processes that a logged in person can instantiate.

Tasks tab displays a list of all tasks that have been assigned to the logged in person, and which that person has to perform some actions.

Similarly the Notifications tab displays a list of all notifications that the logged in person can view, notifications do not require any sort of action.

Clicking on a task link displays the process data that was associated with this screen during development.

Agenda

What is BPM?

Why BPM Matters?

References

Intalio provides a web-based portal for managing and monitoring the deployed processes and their instances.

The Process link lists all the processes with all their versions that are currently deployed on the server along with number of instances and their states.

The Instances link lists all the process instances currently being executed in the system along with their states.

Clicking on a single instance shows its complete information, both in tabular and graphical format.

The graphical format exactly tells what tasks of this instance have been completed, have to be completed or have errors on them.

Intalio BPMS – Business Activity Monitoring

Intalio also provides a BAM component. A BAM provides live information/reports about different processes being executed in the server.

It informs business owners about issues with the process, bottlenecks in the process and also suggests things that can be improved in the process to get further benefits from this process.