Introduction to the Oracle Business Process Management Suite

The Oracle BPM Suite provides an integrated environment for developing,administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.

 

The Oracle BPM Suite:
■ Enables business user to create process models based on standards with
user-friendly applications. It enables collaboration between process developers
and process analysts. Oracle BPM supports BPMN 2.0 and BPEL from modeling
and implementation to runtime and monitoring.
■ Enables process analysts and process owners to customize business processes and
Oracle Business Rules.
■ Provides a web-based application for creating business processes, editing Oracle
Business Rules, and task customization using predefined components.
■ Expands business process management to include flexible, unstructured processes.
It adds dynamic tasks and supports approval routing using declarative patterns
and rules-driven flow determination.
■ Enables collaboration by providing integration with Process Spaces which drives
productivity and innovation.
■ Unifies different stages of the application development life cycle by addressing
end-to-end requirements for developing process-based applications. Oracle BPM
unifies the design, implementation, runtime, and monitoring stages. Oracle BPM enables different personas to participate through all stages of the application
life-cycle.

The Oracle BPM Suite provides a seamless integration of all stages of the application
development life cycle from design-time and implementation to runtime and
application management.
The Oracle BPM Suite is layered on the Oracle SOA Suite and shares many of the same
product components, including:
■ Business Rules
■ Human Workflow
■ Oracle Adapter Framework for Integration

WHY IS BPM DIFFERENT?

BPM is a holistic approach which is neither a business nor an IT function, but incorporates both for a fuller, more sophisticated solution. It is where management consultancy and systems integration meet to produce a whole which is substantially greater than the sum of its parts. 

STRATEGIC BENEFITS

• Visibility of processes, data, problems, solutions, results and requirements for improvement
• Consistency & control over the way processes are handled
• Auditability & traceability of all processes within the BPM framework (particularly important where regulatory compliance is required)
• Enriched customer relationships which deliver more profit for the organisation while delighting more customers
• A continuing capacity for improvement as the BPM feedback loop generates management information (about problem hotspots, resource requirements and training needs, for example).

 BPM life-cycle

Business process management activities can be grouped into six categories: vision, design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization.

Functions are designed around the strategic vision and goals of an organization. Each function is attached with a list of processes. Each functional head in an organization is responsible for certain sets of processes made up of tasks which are to be executed and reported as planned. Multiple processes are aggregated to function accomplishments and multiple functions are aggregated to achieve organizational goals.

Design

Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the factors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.
The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, and system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.
The existing process and the design of new process for various application will have to synchronise as such will not effect the business in major outage. The business as usual is the standard to be attained when design of process for multiple systems is considered.

Modeling

Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" "What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?".

Execution

One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will ask for human input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behaviour, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.

Monitoring

Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. order arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.
In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time or ad hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools generally provided by BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an a priori process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.

Optimization

Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements in the design of the process. Overall, this creates greater business value.

Re-engineering

When the process becomes too noisy and optimization is not fetching the desired output, it is recommended to re-engineer the entire process cycle. BPR has become an integral part of organizations to achieve efficiency and productivity at work.