We position Oracle BPM Suite as central process implementation and documentation platform, where the automation part is the more important one. With process automation media breaches can be avoided, business become more agile as well as transparent and existing process can become more efficiently.
The tool gives us capabilities to significantly increase the transparency regarding business processes and their corresponding executions.
In addition, Oracle BPM Suite allows Business and IT teams to talk about the same things, the business processes, and allows collaboration to document, implement, and optimize the corresponding models.
One of the most valuable features of the solution is the capability to allow the implementation of static processes, using the standard BPMN 2.0 notation, and also to address not straightforward, dynamic process scenarios, by providing features for Case Management (Adaptive Case Management, ACM).
To increase the transparency of the execution models to the overall business processes, BPM Suite provides capabilities to document and model the corresponding high-level business processes (Enterprise Map and Value Chains) and the definition of respective KPIs. This can be done using a lightweight, browser-based tool (BPM Composer). With this, it is basically possible to keep and visualize the big picture, which is often missing when doing BPM projects.
In addition, the platform comes with a very solid foundation, which also allows for the implementation of consistent integrated service base.
The capabilities for building consistent integrative solutions, coming with a broad spectrum of connectivity adapters to integrate with third party enterprise information systems, is key for building flexible BPM applications.
Support for Decision Modelling Notation (DMN). There is a Business Rule Engine available, but this is not DMN-compatible.
No.
No.
The level of technical support is satisfactory. It depends highly on the affected components and on the way the error can be described, and on what information can be provided.
There is also a lot of documentation available. The development community is also responsive and provides a lot of information in the form of blog posts, webcasts, and presentations.
No.
How complex the initial setup is depends on the requirements.
If you need a highly available, clustered solution (Multiple Nodes), then it's more complex than only creating a single node instance.
If you do it for the first time, it seems to be very complex, but there's documentation available (Enterprise Deployment Guide), which describes the needed setup steps on a very detailed level.
It is necessary to evaluate the requirements regarding platform usage and the main operation area of the platform. A topology blueprint should be created and validated against the following questions:
Depending on that, the sizing for the environments should be done.
Yes, Camunda BPM, IBM Process Server, and Appian.
Collecting requirements and being clear what is needed is key to creating a scalable, robust, and future-oriented environment.
Oracle BPM Suite can be used to automate parts of a company's business processes to increase operational efficiency. In addition, the high-level business processes and KPIs, which are important for specific processes, can be documented. But, without a clear, integrated service architecture, BPM cannot be implemented successfully. You have to think about your processes, on the one hand, and on the needed functionalities provided as Services, based on data from the backend systems.
To ensure robustness and easy changeability of the developed services and components, my recommendation is to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) environment as a first step in every project.
The CI environment is the central platform for automated test executions as well as for deployment automation and is needed to ensure development efficiency and agility with respect to changes in existing components.
As a last point, I would like to mention that BPM Suite needs a proper operation concept. It is essential to maintain the platform. You should also think of retention times for the runtime data and which information needs to be kept, e.g., to comply with legal regulations.
Today I’d like to highlight a nice feature of the newest Oracle BPM
Suite Release. I am very happy that Oracle enriched the Suite with
certain Case Management functionalities that fit into the existing
Service Component Architecture (SCA). In the past month I already had
the chance to play a bit with the beta software. With this post I’d like
to share some of my experiences.
Why Case Management?
Business Process Management becomes more and more important. With BPM
Suite processes can be modeled, implemented, simulated and executed in a
multi-user environment. There are also a lot of different reports
available to monitor processes during runtime. We see in our projects,
that this kind of automation is especially valuable for processes which
are based on routine work. Some examples are “Hiring”, “Order-to-Cash”,
“Order Management”, “Travel Request Management” and so on.
However - we also notice quite a high amount of processes, which are too
complex and too flexible to model them in BPMN. We call it
knowledge-intensive work. Of course if you have a lot of time you might
be able to model almost everything but is it a benefit to have processes
which are not readable anymore? How fast is your time-to-market? How
easy is it to implement process changes? How can you support the job of
the knowledge worker? Some typical domains with a high amount of
knowledge-intensive work are Insurances, Banks, Healthcare, Civil
Services and Government Agencies.
Let me try to explain the need of case management with our RYLC example.
RYLC stands for “Rent your legacy car” and it was introduced in a
series of articles as an overall solution example. The main target of
RYLC was to explain concepts like service categories, loose coupling,
canonical data model, service security and much more (see SOA Spezial magazine
for details). The graphic below shows the complete End-to-End RYLC
process in BPMN notation from receiving the request, selection of the
car, checkout of the vehicle, returning it, creation of the invoice and
cash clearance. I highlighted the checkin-part of the process, which
covers the return of the car. It is based on an asynchronous message
exchange pattern - the process execution stops until the checkin is
completed or canceled. In this stage several things can happen.
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| BPMN Example - Rent your legacy car (RYLC) |
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| Key aspects in Case Management |
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| Composite.xml with Case component |
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| Definition of a Case |
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| Definition of a Case Activity |
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| Definition of a Case Rule |
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| Monitoring of Case instances in EM |
With the new Case Management functionalities BPM Suite confirms its outstanding position. I couldn’t wait to play with the software and I am really happy to demonstrate the new product capabilities to our customers. What I didn’t mention so far is the importance of user interfaces and tight integration with content management systems like WebCenter. So there is more to come :-)
Disclaimer: The company I work for is partners with several vendors including Oracle
