The adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) is increasingly becoming one of the most popular approaches for boosting overall organizational excellence. As per industry analyst reports such as those from Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, BPM has been at the top of the senior management focus list for the last three to four years and BPM spending has been at a multi-billion dollar level with healthy double-digit percentage growth in BPM investment; analysts project this trend to stay strong for the upcoming years. BPM is a big deal for most organizations and for most business integration vendors.
By BPM of course we mean the comprehensive treatment of all lifecycle phases of business processes in an organization, including continuous process improvement activities. A BPM initiative needs to cater for a variety of projects where some or all of human workflows, manoeuvring of documents, system automation, and complex decision making might be involved. There are also many different stakeholders with their individual skills and goals. Business analysts, enterprise and solution architects, process designers, developers, and testers focus on concept-to-implementation phases and continuous improvement activities of processes; operation teams manage deployed solutions; process operators and business users are more interested in the outcome that the process generates. A key goal of Oracle BPM Suite 11g has been to deliver on all these requirements in the same platform without over burdening any specific participant.
Built on Oracle's SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Suite infrastructure, BPM Suite 11g provides enhanced support for application integration services and business events, Web 2.0 and E2.0 style collaborations, and high scalability. It is a full-featured, enterprise-grade BPMS that has sufficient easy-to-use features to make it also suitable for small departmental quick-win projects. The main purpose of this book is to provide an accelerated learning path to master the essentials of the product framework and the key features of this feature-rich tool set.
The authors of this book are part of the Oracle BPM Suite product management team, and the book benefits from their in-depth experience of the product. The content is based on dozens of successful BPM Suite trainings conducted by the author team; these trainings have been rolled out world-wide and have been well received by a large audience of Oracle consultants, partners, and customers. Since the goal of this book is to get the reader quickly ramped up on the use of the product, it focuses more on breadth of features rather than on depth—in that sense it is not a reference manual or a handbook. However, from the outcomes of the many trainings that we have already done, we do expect that this tutorial will provide you with a very good understanding of what is possible with the BPM Suite 11g tool set and thus will help you choose the right feature for the problem in hand.
The principal aim of this book is to get you operational with the Oracle BPM Suite 11g R1 product quickly and easily. In this spirit, the largest part of this book is dedicated towards a set of hands-on step-by-step exercises that build a realistic BPM application that you can deploy, test, run, monitor, and manage.
Chapter 1, Business Process Management starts the book off with a quick refresher on the essential BPM concepts, historical perspective, and evolution BPM discipline and standards. The chapter ends with a discussion on BPM benefits.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with BPM follows with an overview of strategies and planning steps helpful in starting individual BPM projects and broader BPM initiatives.
Chapter 3, Product Architecture and Chapter 4, Functional Overview describe the product architecture and key functionalities of BPM Suite 11g. The tutorial uses a Sales Quote process as the base example for creating all the hands-on labs.
Chapter 5, The Tutorial Project: Sales Quote Processing describes this process and the steps that are completed in different follow-on chapters that ultimately lead to the target BPM application.
Chapter 6, Product Installation guides you through the product installation and configuration.
Chapter 7, Process Modeling using BPMN 2.0 covers the essentials of BPMN 2.0 modeling.
Chapter 8, Process Organization Model discusses the representation of roles and organizations units being critical in modeling human activities and interactions.
Chapter 9, Simulation and Analysis of the Business Process describes the process simulation techniques in BPM Suite 11g and their use in process analysis and improvement.
Chapter 10, Implementation of the Business Process discusses how BPMN 2.0 provides execution semantics so that a process model can be executed in a process engine and how this is accomplished in BPM Suite 11g.
Chapter 11, Using Process Composer covers the application BPM Suite 11g tool set, which includes a web browser-based, zero-install application called Process Composer which lets you access, modify, and share a process model.
Chapter 12, Using Process Spaces and Workspace Application discusses how in BPM Suite 11g, collaboration among various process participants and during different lifecycle phases of a process are facilitated by Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 style portals called "Spaces". Such collaboration also includes task reassignment. Also, concepts and use of Spaces are explored in this chapter.
Chapter 13, Process Analytics and Business Activity Monitoring shows how BPM suite 11g allows you to easily generate a variety of analytics, management dashboards, and to connect selected process output events to Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and how these functionalities are accomplished.
Chapter 14, Using Business Rules illustrates the different ways business rules could be used with BPM Suite 11g to control the behaviour of a process and to boost the agility the process.
Chapter 15, Using Human Task Patterns and Other Concepts and Chapter 16, User Interface Development for Human Tasks are focused on handling human tasks including the creation of user interfaces using the Java Server Faces (JSF)-based Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).
Chapter 17, Events and Exception Handling and Chapter 18, Customizing and Extending Process Spaces look at more advanced topics such as handling of exception and events, and Process Space customization.
Chapter 19, Administering the BPM Environment discusses how Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) unifies operational monitoring and management of Fusion Middleware applications such as one created by BPM Suite 11g.
Chapter 20, Concluding Remarks briefly discusses some of the ways you could use such BPM Suite applications to provide business benefits.
This book is primarily intended for BPM developers and process architects with some basic understanding of web services and XML technologies. No prior knowledge of Oracle middleware products including BPM or SOA is assumed. While this is a getting started tutorial, people familiar with Oracle BPM and SOA technologies will find this as a useful refresher tying together various components of the BPM and SOA products.
While the hands-on exercises in this book may be too detailed for business or process analysts, they may find this book useful, skipping or glossing over the details, to get familiar with BPM concepts at a level of detail that is not usually found in analyst targeted books and training. Increasingly, as business and process analysts want to take a more proactive approach in BPM initiatives, such understanding may be critical for them to separate themselves from the rest.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Specify webcenter.jks as the keystore in jps_config as follows."
A block of code is set as follows:
setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty(appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.location', value=jks_loc) setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty(appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.type', value= 'jks') setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty (appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.password', value= 'welcome1')
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty(appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.location', value=jks_loc)
setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty(appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.type', value= 'jks')
setDiscussionForumConnectionProperty (appName='webcenter', name='local-jive', key='keystore.password', value= 'welcome1')New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the two, set Change State to Online, and then click on Save".
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