pp108 : Business Process Management Suite

Business Process Management Suite
This topic describes the Business Process Management Suite in Process Platform context.


Business Process Management (BPM) refers to the activities related to designing, executing , and monitoring of processes in an organization. These activities are important for both process automation and process improvement, and are implemented through a set of tools and applications which form the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS). In a BPMS, designing and storing are design-time activities, whereas execution and monitoring are run time activities.

Design-time activities include modeling of business processes. A BPMS enables you to define and outline business practices, processes, information flows, data stores, and systems in an organization through business modeling. It provides graphical tools to design business models and repositories to store them.

At run time, the BPMS translates the designed models into a computer language, which can be directly executed. It uses external applications, such as Web services, to operate the processes. At run time, it also helps in tracking the business processes for improvement and optimization, using business monitoring software.

Key Features


The Process Platform Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), enables you to model, visualize, execute, monitor, and optimize business processes. It helps you model and develop your business processes with seamless integration between systems, applications, personnel, customers, and regulatory agencies.

Process Platform BPMS provides a rich, graphical modeling environment to model business processes, organization models and case models. It allows you to attach roles to activities in a process, and design compensates, time-outs, and exceptions in a business process model. The event-driven execution layer handles human-to-human and system-to-system interaction through a process engine, which executes business process models designed in the Process Platform business process modeling environment. To be able to execute a process model, the graphical Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is converted into its corresponding Business Process Modeling Language (BPML).
Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is a meta-language for modeling business processes and is an industry standard. Business processes that are modeled using BPML can be graphically represented using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), an associated standard. BPML includes specifications for transactions, data flow, messages, scheduled events, business rules, security roles, exception handling and transaction compensation.

Execution of process models using a BPMS requires a flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which usually makes it impossible or difficult to implement such systems in a legacy IT environment. However, the Process Platform's BPMS takes the help of Process Platform ESB and the underlying service oriented architecture (SOA) to overcome this limitation.

Process Platform's BPMS has the following key features:

Business Process Cycle


The business objectives of an enterprise determine the way its business processes are modeled. Using Process Platform, you can analyze the existing processes and identify scope for improvement, and design/model processes based on your business goals and objectives. You can develop and deploy the processes, and subsequently monitor what you have deployed. Process Platform enables you to not only design and automate routine tasks, but also to orchestrate and optimize sophisticated processes involving people, information, applications and complex exception-handling scenarios. At the core of the Process Platform solution is a continuous process management cycle that follows the natural flow of an enterprise, involving analysis, design, development, and monitoring.

 The following table describes the activities at each stage.

Stage

Description

Benefit

Qualify and Analyze
  • Define organizational structure, its business objectives and drivers
  • Analyze the existing process
  • Select a process and evaluate its advantages on the current processes
  • Recommend a suitable process based on the gap analysis

Higher levels of suitability and adaptability of the designed processes to the organization, and continuous improvement through analysis and process rectification

Design and Model
  • Design an optimizedto-beprocess, containing sub-processes, case activities, rules, and user interaction points
  • Modify business models and processes according to the business objectives and strategy

Flexibility and agility in designing business processes that are governed by business requirements, independent of any IT platform

Develop and Deploy
  • Expose applications and databases using Web services and achieve seamless integration between legacy systems and new applications
  • Define data transformation and routing
  • Augment and extend existing assets by flexibly integrating existing applications and legacy systems

Scalable and stable deployment ensuring excellent business continuity, high availability, and easy expansion of IT infrastructure

Run and Monitor
  • Monitor business operations and performance in real time using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Control processes, eliminate bottlenecks, and manage exceptions in real time
  • Manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Constant monitoring that promises improved transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, and increased support for decision-making



Embedding this closed-loop of BPM in itself, Process Platform provides you with the following advantages:

  • Scope for continuously redefining and improving processes, taking business performance to the next level of efficiency
  • Greater control over businesses through a streamlined governance mechanism based on real-time data, thereby providing a stronger competitive edge
  • User-friendly modeling environment enabling easier and swifter process changes and adaptability

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