Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Overview of this book

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services. A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results: Better management visibility of their business: improved decision making Low cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized components Better outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfaction Businesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life. JBoss jBPM offers the following key features: Graphical process definition Flexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definition A customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve defined Easy programming model to extend the graphical process definition A process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java. Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 2. Understanding the target process

The last chapter has given us a bit of background to business process management and it is now time for us to dive right in and get our project up and running. The project outline described in this book is intended to deliver a BPM system that is fully functional and usable in the live environment, although there will be many opportunities left for further development of the end product. The point of our project is to prove that the BPM concept can deliver value to our organization, so that management will agree to further investment and proper development of the system.

Given that our objective is of a limited nature, it makes sense for our project to deliver as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, in our haste we should not sacrifice proper project documentation and methodology, for without an audit trail, the concept will remain unproven. While this book isn't about project management methodology, we will at least describe how to initiate the...