Table of Contents
What is BPM?. 1
Process modelling terms. 1
BPM Acid Test 2
Standards. 2
BPEL in a Nutshell 2
Business Process Lifecycle. 2
RMS (Resource Management System) 3
- Value Proposition. 3
- Functional Overview. 3
- Resource Request Process
References
. 3
What is BPM?
Business process management is a natural and
holistic management approach for operating business that produces highly
efficient, agile, innovative and adoptive organization that far exceeds that
achievable through traditional management approaches.
Business Process Management include
- Business Process Modelling
- Study of “As Is” and “To Be” business processes using
Simulation techniques and optimizing the process
- Define key performance indicators to track process performance
- Automating the process using BPM tools
- Business Activity Monitoring to collect metrics on real time
process performance
- Continuous improvement of the process based on the business
metrics collected
Thus Business process management is not a mere
technology solution. It is more towards a Methodology to optimize the business
processes enabled by right set of tools. BPM brings in a lot of synergy between
business and IT, thus helps produce highly agile systems. The basis of business
process management is the explicit representation of business processes with
their activities and the execution constraints between them.
Process modelling terms
Being algorithmic, a process can potentially
be run by some sort of process engine. As long as the process can be expressed
in a form that is syntactically and semantically unambiguous—that is, in a
programming language or other interpretable form—the engine can accept it as
input, set it in motion, and drive its flow of control. To be precise, the
engine creates and runs instances of a given process definition. The steps of
the process are called activities or tasks.
The following list summarizes the most
important process modelling terms and their relationships to each other:
- Process
definition - The basic
algorithm or behavior of the process.
- Process
instance - An occurrence of a process for
specific input. Each instance of the travel reservation process, for
example, is tied to a specific customer's itinerary.
- Activity or
task - A step in a process, such as
sending a flight request to the airline.
- Automated
activity or automated task - A step in a
process that is performed directly by the execution engine.
- Manual
activity or manual task - A step in a
process that is meant to be performed by a human process participant.
BPM Acid Test
BPM is suited only for applications with an
essential sense of state or process—that is, applications that are process-oriented.
An application passes the BPM acid test if it is legitimately process-oriented.
The resource management application, for example, passes the test because it is
best understood in terms of the state of the resource request and is defined at
all times by how far the resource request has gotten. Other typical
characteristics of a process-oriented application include the following:
- Long-running:
From start to finish, the process spans
hours, days, weeks, months, or more.
- Persisted
state: Because the process is long-lived, its
state is persisted to a database so that it outlasts the server hosting
it.
- Triggered
by events: The process spends most of
its time asleep, waiting for the next triggering event to occur, at which
point it wakes up and performs a flurry of activities.
- Orchestration
of system or human communications: The
process is responsible for managing and coordinating the communications of
various system or human actors.
Some process-oriented applications have only a
subset of these characteristics.
Standards
Some of the most important of BPM standards
include the OASIS group's BPEL standard , BPMI's BPML and BPMN standards, etc. BPEL is the BPM specification with the
strongest backing (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA) and the greatest chance to win
the standards war
BPEL in a Nutshell
- A BPEL process is a web service with an associated process
definition defined in an XML-based language.
- The behavior of a BPEL process is to act on, and be acted on
by, other processes; put differently, a BPEL process can invoke another
web service or be invoked as a web service.
- BPEL descends from two very different process languages:
Microsoft's XLANG and IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL).
- The essential BPEL language constructs designers will need to
understand to create a BPEL process: the basic process structure,
variables and assignments, exception handling and compensation, split and
join, loops, participant exchange, transactions, and extensions.
- The flow of a BPEL process includes service touch points
(receive, invoke, reply) and control flow elements (wait, while, switch,
flow, sequence, scope).
Business Process Lifecycle
A business process lifecycle covers the
following phases:
- Process discovery
- Process design
- Process Implementation
- Process execution & monitoring
- Process simulation
- Process optimization
RMS (Resource Management System)
RMS is a solution powered by BPM. This section
the value proposition and functional overview of RMS business process.
Value Proposition
RMS uses BPM tool to add value to resource
request handling process as listed below:
- Facilitates modelling of an existing resource request handling
process workflow
- Allows identification of the pain areas in the work flow and
their resolution before process implementation in production (using the
simulation features of BPM tools)
- Ensures close alignment of business and IT by virtue of the
business model driving the IT development downstream
- Allows definition and change of business rules with the help
of rule component, increasing business agility in response to market
changes.
- Reduces time and cost
- Provides 24X7 availability using ubiquitous standard
interfaces
Functional Overview
RMS captures resource request handling process
end to end.
RMS is a web based system used by managers in
the IT services company to capture resource request required in a project
assignment of his organization. Once the Manager (Consumer) of a business unit
captures/creates the resource request details, the resource request handling
process is initiated. Then the resource
request is verified and processed by Resource Managers (Dispatcher) of the company.
Resource Request Process
Steps involved in Resource Request Handling
Process:-
- Consumer creates a resource request for an opportunity and
submits the request to Dispatcher.
- Dispatcher searches matching employee profiles and analyzes
matching for suitability and availability.
- If there are matching profiles then Dispatcher allocates the
matching profiles to resource request and sends them to Consumer for
acceptance.
- If there are no matching profiles then Dispatcher sends the
resource request back to Consumer for clarification.
- Consumer validates all the employee profiles allocated for the
resource request by the Dispatcher and confirms acceptance if the employee
profiles match the requirement. Otherwise
the Consumer declines the profiles.
- If the employee profiles are accepted then the Dispatcher
approves the allocation of the identified employee profiles for the
resource request and the request is marked as allocated.
References
- Essential Business Process Modelling By Michael
Havey
