Process Platform - An Overview

This topic provides an overview of Process Platform Business Operations Platform.

OpenText Process Suite Platform (Process Platform) is a next generation Business Process Management (BPM) solution in a single platform, which allows organizations to design, execute, monitor, change, and continuously optimize their critical business processes and operations. It is designed to truly support the way business operates, finally bringing the business and IT worlds together. It allows organizations to dramatically improve the speed of change, drive maximum value out of their existing systems, and fundamentally alter the way they innovate business operations. It is a new way of delivering the agility and flexibility needed to support today's rapidly changing business environment and the challenges posed by globalization.

Core Components

A set of building blocks form the core components of Process Platform, which make it versatile and functionally rich. The chief components among these are:

• Composite Application Framework (CAF) - It enables creation of user interfaces and business applications.
• Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) - A comprehensive set of tools and frameworks that enable process automation and process improvement. It includes Case Management, Rules Management, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).
• Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) Grid - It enables integration of applications and services along with Enterprise Service Bus and Master Data Management (MDM).

Built around a unifying architectural model, these building blocks integrate with each other to deliver a seamless, reliable, and high-performance design and run-time environment to carry out your enterprise business. The features and capabilities of this unified platform can be encapsulated under three broad operational themes -Total BPM, Mashup Enterprise, and Collaborative Workspace.

Total BPM
Total BPM represents the synergy of different perspectives of business process and workflow automation disciplines. The core tenets of this emerging, holistic business discipline are embodied in the following key principles:

• End-to-end Business Process Lifecycle Management that includes everything from process modeling to execution, presents real-time operational insight, and further leads to continuous process improvement.
• Support for multiple and varied process patterns including Task Routing; Integration-centric, Straight-through Processes; Dynamic and Knowledge-intensive Case Flows.
• Integrate all of an organization's resources including Application Systems, Business Experts (people), organization structures, business rules, business content, and so on.
• Foster collaboration both within the enterprise and beyond.

The feature highlights of Process Platform that support this theme include:

• Standards-based processes
• Powerful, multi-level business rules
• Model and execute knowledge-intensive, adhoc workflows
• Organizational modeling
• Dynamic workload balancing

Thus, organizations, which embrace Total BPM can align and harness their core capabilities in a synergistic orchestration of business operations that will not only keep them equipped to counter and respond to any positive or negative change but also to consistently improve their processes.

Mashup Enterprise
To maximize value from their existing IT systems, enterprises look to the Internet and associated technologies. Collaboration was the key to address growing business automation and integration needs of an enterprise. As a result, an enterprise assumed a new form called Mashup Enterprise. A Mashup Enterprise embraces the notion of the Web as the Platform and fosters process improvements and business innovation by enabling collaborative content generation, both within the enterprise and beyond. It provides infrastructure and easy-to-compose tools to design and create rich, composite Web applications. Thus, it empowers its business user community to combine business expertise and software development capabilities to generate new insights into business operations.

Process Platform provides organizations with a robust, standards-based platform and application frameworks that make the task of building and deploying Rich Internet Applications (RIA) very easy. The salient features of Process Platform that support the creation of the Mashup Enterprise include:

• Composite Application Framework (CAF) - It provides an application development framework that enables creation of rich Web applications with a unified, single-view user experience, using data from disparate sources (Mashups), including the Internet.
• WYSIWYG Mashup Designer - It helps in rapid development of application process forms, rich with multiple customizable options to adapt to differing business needs. It enables building, testing, and deploying rich, Internet-based applications.
• Web Workplace - A unified and customizable user interface framework for composite applications. It enables personalized organization of work items to achieve a unified and personalized workplace.

Collectively, these enhance business user productivity, enable rapid adaptation of businesses to market changes, and empower the business workforce, making it capable of responding to calls for business process innovation.

Collaborative Workspace
The capabilities to address seamless collaboration needs between business experts and IT users are delivered through a unified working environment where applications can be built, tested, and packaged for eventual deployment in desired production systems. In Process Platform, this capability is manifested in the form of the Collaborative Workspace (CWS) - an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides a development space wherein all the stakeholders of a project - even if distributed by distance or time - can discuss, brainstorm, and share knowledge to carry out tasks to create an executable deliverable and its supporting artifacts.

CWS adequately reflects the uniformity of a single platform that enables building composite applications governed by the discipline of BPM. It is a collaborative, Web-based, model-driven environment enabling business and IT to jointly create, deliver, and deploy business solutions. CWS provides a single view of all business solution content through workspace isolation, enabling you to validate your changes before sharing them with your team.

The core capabilities of CWS are:

• Centralized Information Management, enabling sharing of design-time content
• Web-based, shared project workspaces that transcend boundaries of geography and time
• Single repository based on a unified meta model
• Configuration control of shared artifacts
• Automatic dependency tracking among documents
• Single-click building and deployment of content to runtime

Underlying Architecture

The Process Platform employs several important software design principles, guided by leading-edge architectural ideas. At its core, SOA principles direct the behavior of the product. All the components are designed as standards-based services that encapsulate the functionality delivered by the component. Interactions between service users and service providers is governed through well-defined, formal service contracts, which express the terms and conditions for use.

To meet the stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) needs of business enterprises, Process Platform is architected as an extremely scalable and highly available solution, based on a carrier-grade SOA Grid, also known as the Smart Services Grid. To achieve nearly linear scalability, the SOA Grid provides self-optimizing load management and fully distributed deployment of all the services on a grid of commodity hardware blades. A robust high availability framework facilitates non-stop execution of mission-critical business processes.

Process Platform also comes with built-in security provisions that deliver multiple levels of security, which is a crucial requirement when executing business processes across multiple system and application boundaries.

These architectural underpins enable Process Platform to be a fully-integrated SOA-based BPM platform, which empowers organizations to easily adapt to change and innovate, without looking back.

Benefits of Process Platform

Process Platform helps you overcome the impediments in managing and improving large enterprise business processes. In a nutshell, it offers the following benefits:

• Faster development and deployment - Dramatically increase the speed of change in your business operations and exploit new revenue opportunities faster. Build new processes and applications on the fly, exactly the way business wants.
• Single platform - Increased productivity with a completely integrated platform and Collaborative Workspace that enables faster time-to-market development cycles.
• Continuous improvement - Design, execute, monitor, change, and continuously optimize your critical business processes with closed-loop BPM.
• True collaboration between business and IT - It enables business professionals to gain better visibility over business processes and transition their requirements to IT with greater confidence. The platform enables IT to become more flexible and agile, and to meet business demands more effectively.

Using Process Platform, business professionals can create a complete business operations environment that will foster collaboration, innovation, efficiency, and productivity for their enterprise. Simply put, this means an open and effective environment for different professionals in an enterprise to collaborate in designing and improving processes and underlying technologies. At the same time, a distinct logical separation of activities empowers different departments, users, and owners to act autonomously.