Business process owners are C-level and top executives; the people who might have been directly involved in funding or reporting to the board of directors, or the people who are held directly responsible for the overall business performance. They understand, own, and run the business. Their business can be spread into different geographical locations with different lines of business coming under their enterprise. They will be interested in real-time dashboards, business intelligence, and take key decisions based on key performance indicators and other metrics.
BPM has out of the box integration with the BAM application that enables business process participants and process owners to view real-time dashboards. They can also use WebCenter Portal with its out of the box integration capabilities, along with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBI EE), to view and analyze and take decisions on some of the most complex multidimensional reports.
From a business process, we can capture process-specific data that makes business sense. Some of the terminologies that need to be understood are:
Measurements: Measurements are numerical data. They are basically numbers that make sense in a business process report. For example, a requested loan amount or age group of people can be one of the required measurement fields.
Dimensions: Dimensions are an indication of how the data might be sliced. For example, lower income group, higher income group, middle income group, and so on.
Counters: Counters simply indicate a count in the process. For example, the number of applications in a given month.
Some of the measurements and dimensions that we are going to use are tabulated as follows:
|
Measurement name |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Requested loan amount measurement |
This maps to the requested loan amount that was entered by the applicant during the eligibility check |
|
Repayment duration measurement |
This maps to the repayment period that was given during the eligibility check |
|
Dimension name |
Description |
|
Income group dimension |
The range is set as follows:
Similarly, we can create a few more dimensions such as customer type dimension and company name dimension, depending on the business requirements. |
From a business reporting requirement point of view, some the reports that make sense from a home loan perspective are:
Number of loan applications in a given period of time
Number of applications that are at various stages of approval, pending approval, or rejected
Complete data view of all loan applications
Income group of loan applicants that can be high-, middle-, and lower-income group
The loan requested amount for a given period of time
Changes in fixed and variable rate of interests
Total amount of loan approved in a given quarter of a month and comparing those with the previous quarter
Before we begin, the following requirements need to be fulfilled:
Download the source code from the previous recipe.
Start SOA Suite and the BAM servers. As BAM Web UI is visible on Windows using Internet Explorer, we need a Windows machine with IE7 or 8 installed to view these reports and the BAM application.
It is assumed that Database Adapters and BAM Adapters have already been configured in Enterprise Manager.
We will add a simple Database Adapter, Get Eligibility Details, that fetches eligibility data based on the request ID of the applicant through an SQL query, as follows:
select PROPERTYCITY, LOANAMOUNT, LOANPURPOSE, MARKETVALUE, REPLAYMENTDURATION, AGE, EMPLOYMENTTYPE, COMPANYNAME, AVERAGEMONTHLYINCOME, CUSTTYPE, FIXEDEMI, VARIABLEEMI, REQUESTID from ELIGIBILITYDATA where REQUESTID = ?
We will add a service task activity on LoanApplicationProcess that invokes the Get Eligibility Details Database Adapter. We can name this service activity as Get Applicants Eligibility Details.
We will now modify the process to add BAM data object based dimensions and measurements, and also use the BAM application to create a process dashboard.
We will select the home loan business process and add an application counter that counts the number of times the process has been executed. We can put this at the start of the process, or just while the loan application is initiated by James Cooper. To do that, let's perform the following steps:
Launch JDeveloper and then right-click on the
Loan Applicationinitiator task and add a counter mark.Assign it to the application counter.
We will now create the following dimensions and measurements, as discussed earlier at the start of this recipe:
Right-click on
LoanApplicationProjand select Project Preferences. Under Process Analytics Summary, ensure that eis/bam/soap is selected. Also, the Enable Cubes and Enable BAM checkboxes are selected. We can select the default folder path or select a new path as required.Log in to BAM as the
weblogicuser athttp://localhost:9001/OracleBAM/.Click on Architect. We can now view data in the BAM data objects that got pushed from BPM. Usually, the data object name will be of the form
BI_default_<project name>_<process name>. In our case, it will beBI_default_LoanApplicationProj_LoanApplicationProcess.In BAM Active Studio, create the report by selecting a report type and the data objects that holds our BPM data. The Data tab shows all the available columns. We can select the one that is needed to generate our report.
We can click on the Properties tab to enable formatting of text on the x and y axes. We can also select themes, or create calculated fields, depending on the nature of the report requirements.
BAM also is capable of sending BAM alerts and notifications that can be configured. For example, we can set up an alert when a fraud is detected during the document verification stage.
The output of this recipe uses the business process that is capable of delivering standard and customized business reports to the business process owners and the business analysts. We have created some standard and customized reports that can be viewed in the BAM dashboard.
From the BAM Active Viewer, we can view the standard and customized reports. Some of the customized reports that we have created for the process owners are shown in the following screenshot:
It would be interesting to know that BAM presents real-time reports based on data objects that get populated by one or more business processes. On the other hand, BI reports are capable of building reports from multiple data sources such as databases, XML files, Excel files, and historical data. BI reports add a layer of analysis and intelligence on top of an existing dataset. In a real-life financial services scenario, the process owner or the participants can have a combined report view of all BPM standard reports, and BI and BAM reports, on their WebCenter Portal. There can also be user- and context-based reports. Users can also personalize these reports based on their roles.