Type Your Title Here - Oracle



Streamline Business Processes in Real-Time with

Business Activity Monitoring

Prashant Nema, Oracle Corporation

Executive Overview 2

The Corporate Business Process 2

The Manual Business Process - Basics 2

The Manual Business Process- An Example 4

Real-Time Business Process Monitoring 6

Business Process Management System (BPMS) 7

BPMS Managed Business Process - Basics 9

BPMS Managed Business Process- An Example 10

Real-Time Business Process Monitoring 12

OracleAS Integration – BPMS and Beyond 13

Streamline Business Processes 14

Path to Business optimization 15

Business Process Monitoring 17

Business Activity Monitoring 19

Business Process Optimization 20

Executive Overview

Oracle working with its large install base, of both Business and IT users, in the last two decades has learnt that customer are consistently striving to achieve two needs, that are absolutely necessary for the Corporate success. They are 1. Business Visibility, and 2. Business Control. Today’s Corporations all use some kind of systems for doing business. Enterprise Departments are demanding from their IT Managers, more and more ability to have complete visibility into their business operations and demanding to be in control of the operations. IT on the other hand wants to get away from being the bottleneck in doing business, but rather be the value adder to the business operations. Enterprises have realized that the key is in leveraging more the systems and processes in place in the Organization, and not deploying new ones. Hence various Integration efforts are underway in every Corporation to leverage the existing intellectual property residing in the Corporate Processes and Business Systems implemented.

Business Process Integration is the approach to build the Enterprise Integration platform for complete Business visibility and Control. The new genre of Business Process Management Systems bundled in the Business Process Integration Platforms are now mature to provide the ability to deploy the most complex Enterprise processes that span multiple Corporate systems and Departments. Using the Business Process Integration Platform besides Integrating the silos of Information and Processes, gives the Business the visibility they need in real-time and puts them in control directly, without involving IT, to take the necessary actions needed to influence the daily business operations.

The Primary purpose of this paper is to unveil the power of the Corporate Business Process Visibility. The paper helps identify the next revolution in IT management systems, similar to what the RDBMS did to business data two decades ago. The Business Process Management System (BPMS) is the foundation Killer application to take the Enterprise to the next level, enabling automation, Integration and most importantly opening a window to Business Process Visibility and Control.

The Corporate Business Process

Organizations have being doing Business with each other and consumers for many centuries now. Since the early 1900s the Organizational size has grown multifold, from the small town industries to the modern days Multinational Corporations. Businesses that have been able to scale to such levels have one thing in common i.e. adoption of corporate discipline to implement and follow Corporate Processes for doing Business.

In the last two decades these Corporations using Processes have tried various waves of evolving to the next level of being efficient & competitive e.g. Business Process Re-engineering that promised dramatic improvements, but it turned out, involved a lot of manual work and a great deal of pain. It may have improved performance, but it failed to provide agility or support on-going change. Computer systems of the 1980s and 1990s could not adequately represent the full complexity of business processes, let alone provide tools for managing them. Business Process discovery and design was accomplished in team meetings using whiteboards. Deployment consisted of just another team meeting. Execution consisted of adoption of the new rules and procedures, or a process map that IT was supposed to miraculously implement in some custom system. Maintenance was only undertaken in the event of major business failure, and optimization was a matter of wishful thinking.

In the rest of this section we will analyze and understand all the Basics of the Corporate Business Processes. We will first lay out all the key aspects associated to the Corporate Business Process, to be able to appreciate its advantages and the also the challenges posed to the Corporations. Next we will see these key aspects reflected in the light of a Real world Corporate Business Process and finally we’ll analyze to what extent can the Corporation manage and control this Business Process.

The Manual Business Process - Basics

What is a Business Process?

FOR EVERY REPEATING CORPORATE ACTIVITY, A SERIES OF VARIOUS TASKS HAVE TO BE PERFORMED IN A CERTAIN PATTERN AND SEQUENCE EVERY TIME THE ACTIVITY IS REPEATED. E.G. “BUYING A LAPTOP FOR THE EMPLOYEE”, ”PLACEMENT OF COMPONENTS ON AN ASSEMBLY PLANT”. THE MANIFESTATION OF A SUCH CORPORATE ACTIVITY IS KNOWN AS A “BUSINESS PROCESS”. ITS DEFINED IN EVERY CORPORATION FOR ALL THE REPEATING ACTIVITIES, AND ALL PARTIES INVOLVED WITH THE ACTIVITY IMPLEMENT IT AND FOLLOW IT. THE BUSINESS PROCESS REMOVES AMBIGUITY AND VARIATIONS FROM THE ACTIVITY AND ENSURES CONSISTENT PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY IN THE ORGANIZATION.

Who are the Participants of a Business Process?

EVERY CORPORATE BUSINESS PROCESS IS CONSTITUTED OF ONE OR MORE TASKS. A PARTICIPANT OF THE PROCESS PERFORMS EACH TASK. HENCE MULTIPLE PARTICIPANTS DO THEIR TASK TO FULFILL IN ONE BUSINESS PROCESS. THE PARTICIPANTS COULD BE

1. People - e.g. employees, managers, trading partners representatives

2. Systems - e.g. applications, databases, legacy platforms, trading partners applications

3. Processes - e.g. existing Business Processes, Partners Business Processes

How is the Business Process executed?

EVERY PARTICIPANT OF THE CORPORATE BUSINESS PROCESS RECEIVES THE RESULT OF THE PREVIOUS COMPLETED TASK. THE PARTICIPANT COMPLETES THE TASK WITH ITS PROCESSING CAPACITY AND PASSES THE TASKS RESULT IN TURN TO THE NEXT TASK. THIS CHAIN OF TASK PROCESSING BY PARTICIPANTS EXECUTES THE WHOLE BUSINESS PROCESS. SOME TASKS ARE EXECUTED COMPLETELY MANUAL E.G. FILING A REQUISITION FORM FOR A NEW LAPTOP, WHILE SOME ARE PARTIALLY AUTOMATED E.G. CLERK CHECKS THE QUANTITY OF COMPONENTS IN STOCK USING AN INVENTORY APPLICATION. SOME COULD BE EXECUTED COMPLETELY AUTOMATED E.G. A MACHINE SCANS FOR NEW ITEMS RECEIVED ON THE RECEIVING DOCKS AND UPDATES INVENTORY APPLICATION.

Hence a Business Process can be completely Manual, or Semi-automatic or completely automated. It all depends on how the Corporation wants to and has been able to manifest the corporate activity and their tasks. Most real world Business Processes are hybrids, i.e. corporations want efficiency through automation but not foregoing ability be in control of the process and manage it effectively. e.g. approval of new requisitions punched into the procurement system i.e. requisitions are created efficiently in the system without filling in any forms and validated by the system, but they are approved manually in the system by the manager.

How much can the Business Process be controlled?

ANY PROCESS IS USELESS IF IT CANNOT BE CONTROLLED, SIMPLY PUT PROCESS OWNERS NEED TO BE IN CHARGE TO INFLUENCE THE PROCESS EXECUTION AND BEHAVIOR. THE BUSINESS PROCESS OWNER NEEDS TO HAVE THE COMPLETE CONTROL -

1. Commission a new Business Process

2. Stop & Start the Process

3. Decommission the Process

4. Ability to dynamically change the Business Process

5. Check a Process execution result

6. Track the execution path of a completed or in progress Business Process

The Corporation expects the Business Process Owners to be able to manage and control the business processes, as that directly translates Corporation efficiency. Every Business Owner should be able to say at what task is the execution at the moment, what tasks are completed and what are pending for the Process.

For example, in a poor fiscal quarter where the Corporation wants to cut costs and decides to stop procurement of all new IT equipment and monitor closely all other procurement. Now when there is zero business process control the procurement process cannot be stopped easily without going through allot of pain, and in a process with simple control can be completely stopped but it affects all procurement in the Corporation. The well-controlled process allows to dynamically alter the process to stop IT procurement alone.

Can the Business Process be Optimized ?

BUSINESS PROCESS VISIBILITY IS THE KEY TO BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION. IF THE CORPORATION DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH INSIGHT AND CONTINUOUS VISIBILITY ACROSS ALL BUSINESS PROCESSES, IT DOESN’T HAVE THE RIGHT TOOLS AND METRICS TO MAKE ITS DECISIONS ON ENTERPRISE PROCESS CHANGES THAT LEAD BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION. EVERY TASK IN THE CORPORATE BUSINESS PROCESSES IS AN ESSENTIAL BRICK THAT HELPS MAKE THE SKYSCRAPER I.E. THE CORPORATION. THE CORPORATION NEEDS TO IDENTIFY THE BAD BRICKS IN TIME TO REPAIR OR REPLACE THEM BEFORE ANY ACCIDENT OR CATASTROPHE. THEY ALSO NEED TO BE ABLE TO ADD NEW FLOORS (DEFINE NEW PROCESSES) OR ALTER EXISTING FLOOR PLANS (CHANGE EXISTING PROCESSES WITH NEW TASKS) TO MAKE THE SKYSCRAPER STRONGER AND TALLER.

Corporations have been wanting to be striving to streamline their Business Processes to maintain an Optimal Corporation. This is only possible in a Real-time enterprise that has visibility into whats happening now in the Corporation . The ability to Monitor Business Process in Real-time and collect the execution behavior metrics task by task in every Business Process is extremely vital and essential. This will be the only real basis on which Management can decide Business Process Optimizations.

The below are the unanswered needs of the modern Corporation that all vendors are trying to build a killer application for -

1. Real-Time Business Process Monitoring

2. Business Process Metrics collection

3. Business Process analytics

4. Real-Time Business Process Changes and

5. Business Optimization

The Manual Business Process- An Example

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What is the Business Process?

MANIFESTATION OF THE STANDARD PROCUREMENT PROCESS. THE PROCESS IS MANIFESTED TO ENSURE ALL CORPORATE PROCUREMENT FROM EXTERNAL SUPPLIERS IS DONE THE SAME WAY, EVERYTIME.

1. Employee fills a requisition form and forwards to Manager for approval

2. Dept Manager checks form and approves (or rejects) and forwards to Purchasing Dept.

3. Purchasing Manager receives requisition, validates and places a standard purchase order

iv. Invalid requisitions are returned to sender

v. Valid requisitions are entered in the Purchasing system

vi. The supplier selection process suggests the preferred supplier

vii. Purchasing Manager makes a purchase order for the supplier

viii. Purchasing Manager faxes the PO to the supplier and follows up by call to acknowledge receipt

Who are the Participants of a Business Process?

THE PARTICIPANTS TO FULFILL THE STANDARD PROCUREMENT PROCESS ARE

1. People – Employee, Dept. Manager, Purchasing Manager, Supplier Sales Manager

2. Systems – Requisition system, Purchasing application, Supplier applications

3. Processes – Supplier selection process, Supplier contact and order process

How is the Business Process executed?

DON’T HAVE TOO MUCH CHOICE, MOSTLY MANUAL. THE PROCESS IS VERY INFLEXIBLE AND TIME CONSUMING.

How much can the Business Process be controlled?

THE PROCUREMENT BUSINESS PROCESS OWNER NEEDS CONTROL. BUT HAS -

1. Commission a new Business Process – through meetings, discussions, documentations and emails

2. Stop & Start the Process – Not possible

3. Decommission the Process - through meetings, discussions, documentations and emails

4. Ability to dynamically change the Business Process - Not possible

5. Check a Process execution result – Partially in the Purchasing system

6. Track the execution path of a completed or in progress Business Process - Not possible

Can the Business Process be Optimized ?

MINISCULE OR NO BUSINESS PROCESS VISIBILITY. NO BUSINESS METRICS AVAILABLE TO SEE AND MONITOR AND EVENTUALLY MAKE OPTIMIZATION DECISIONS. THE BELOW REFLECT THE NEEDS OF THE CORPORATION FOR PROCUREMENT OPTIMIZATION

1. Real-Time Business Process Monitoring - Not possible

2. Business Process Metrics collection - Not possible

3. Business Process analytics - Not possible

4. Real-Time Business Process Changes - Not possible

5. Business Optimization - Not possible

Real-Time Business Process Monitoring

In a corporation with the above example standard Process implemented, one needs to be able to monitor from various angles, the current process state, execution flow, trends, behavior etc. Depending on the Management role and responsibility in the corporation they have interest in different pieces if information to query and gather in real-time from the implemented Business Process. This ability is known as Business Visibility and is the strength the Corporate Management seeks today. With the standard Procurement Business Process implemented in an Organization, the below is a sample of top process monitoring queries that Managers struggle to get answers to everyday-

|Employee : |

|1. What is the current status on my Requisition? NO the employee cannot check status , he cannot only wait for rejections to come back from his Dept. |

|Manager or the Purchasing Manager. |

|2. How long did it take to order a new laptop by anybody in my Department? No the employee has no mechanism to know this information at all. |

| |

|Department Manager : |

|1. What is the current status on all the Departments Requisitions? – NO he cannot track where the requisition is now in the Procurement Business |

|Process. At the maximum he can call Purchasing and inquire if it was received and what are doing with it? |

|2. What is the total cost in supplier orders raised for my Dept this month and YTD? - NO he cant do this in Real-time to make a decision on approving a |

|new major expense in the Dept. He can at best see reports sent to him last week or query the Data warehouse(in large Corporations) that shows status as|

|of yesterday night. |

| |

|Purchasing Manager : |

|How many invalid requisitions were sent and rejected by Purchasing for a particular Dept this month to date? – NO, if the requisition is a manual |

|document received and scanned for validation. |

|What is the status on all the open requisitions for purchase? – NO as Purchasing has no visibility to know how many requisitions have been already put |

|for procurement in various departments |

| |

|VP of Purchasing |

|What is the average time taken to handle a requisition? – NO it’s not getting tracked, logged as there various participants involved across departments |

|Can we Improve or Optimize the Procurement Experience (or Process)? – NO as he does not know what is the current experience or inefficiencies in the |

|Process |

| |

|Chief Operations/Process Officer |

|Can I monitor the Corporate Procurement Process end–to-end any time of the day? – NO not possible, unless he decides to take a walk and follow the paper|

|trail in the Depts. |

As you must have realized though the modern Corporations that have grown over time and have come so far implementing Business Processes for streamlined operations now need something more to grow to the next level. The Business Managers need the answers to the above questions and similar hundreds more everyday in real-time to take the Enterprise to the next level of success and, to even sustain their current success levels and efficiencies in the competitive industry environments.

Business Process Management System (BPMS)

Over time, process mapping solutions emerged that could capture and document enterprise business processes in an editable form for future manipulation and analysis. The primary purpose was to produce documentation about the way the company worked. These tools, however, could not carry process models directly to execution, and gave insufficient attention to the collaborative aspects of real world processes and their complexity. In the discovery phase, however, these tools made it possible edit and maintain the process blueprint, and publish reports. Optimization and maintenance relied on visual inspection of the process designs, because the business-IT divide still separated strategic goals from technical implementations. The trend toward process simulation and analysis was evident, with a link from planning to execution.

This led to the evolution of the Business Process Management System(BPMS) that can:

1. Bridge the perennial gap between IT and Business users

2. Allow processes to be graphically modeled and automatically converted to executable business processes

3. Solve the pressing Enterprise integration problems

4. Allows for new avenues of Corporate automation

5. Provide a Corporate Platform to easily build the killer application that collects and presents in real-time business metrics and process monitoring capabilities

BPMS can be used to automate just about any process. A common use is to automate processes that span systems, such as multi-system customer provisioning. BPM really shines when used to automate processes that contain a mixture of automated and human activities. Without BPMS, processes become quickly locked up into isolated units. BPMS allow to see and control all parts of a long-lived, multi-step information request or transaction that spans multiple applications and people in one or more departments or Corporations. Companies have tried & used primitive types of process management systems in the past. These earlier solutions might have been custom-built combinations of workflow, document management, or systems automation with custom coding. Because no one tool has been capable of providing a satisfactory solution, enterprises have faced large functional gaps and added complexity. A BPMS solution is a graphical productivity tool for modeling, integrating, monitoring, and optimizing process flows of all sizes, crossing any application, company boundary, or human interaction. Using a BPMS, processes can be viewed by human users as information and by machines as executable code—at the same time. Process design proceeds from both the top down—at the level of business strategy and business process design—and from the bottom up, at the level of leveraging existing IT systems. Discovered activity is modeled by Business Analysts using standard electronic formats into process designs, which populate the process management system and its repository. Process management systems separate process design and subsequent process change from integration activities, which are managed in different lifecycles by only some BPMS like OracleAS Integration. Process models developed in different parts of the business, can be related to one another, independent of the technical details, through process-level interfaces. Discovery, design, deployment and maintenance occur in parallel, not in ordered series, across hundreds of processes.

Oracle Application Server 10g provides a comprehensive event driven Business Process Integration Server with a built-in full capacity BPMS i.e. OracleAS Integration. OracleAS Integration includes built-in metrics that provide process-level metrics & instrumentation, management information that can guide process optimization, and incremental refinement. Analysis is end-to-end, closing the loop between design and runtime operations. Process designs are reflected directly in the IT infrastructure within the Oracle Application Server Platform. Such an approach leverages existing investments by connecting databases, legacy systems and best-of-breed package solutions into flexible end-to-end business processes, supporting the needs of managers, process engineers, functional departments and employees, as well as IT developers—all in the context of a unified, process-based view of the business.

OracleAS Integration architecture provides for all the tools & services required from a complete BPMS solution. Besides we will look at OracleAS Integration solutions services from the Integration perspective in the next section.

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Model – The tool allows the business analyst to model any business process right from his desk through a Web Browser. The Tool allows multiple people to work on the same Business Process simultaneously to review and build the Business Process

Deploy – The solution maintains all modeled Process definition as metadata in the Design Time repository. When the Designer is ready she can deploy the Process. I.e. Metadata will be optimized an copied to the Runtime repository.

Execute - A Deployed business Process means a corporate activity’s manifestation is made active. The Process Engine is executing transactions as per the metadata in the runtime repository, task by task for every instance of the process. Simultaneously the Engine is also collecting monitoring states of the Process and Business Metrics.

Manage – The Business or IT managers have full control over the Process state and can monitor the current state of a Business Process. As required they can start and stop processes and manage exceptions.

Optimize – The Upper Management and Process Owners now see the Process Metrics collected in realtime. Various representations of the business metrics can sliced and diced to come to quick proactive business decisions. The decisions can require change to existing business processes, which can be done easily by the analyst in the Modeling tool.

BPMS Managed Business Process - Basics

In the light of the arrival of the BPMS in the corporation the Business Process Basics need to be reviewed (compared to the earlier section).

DISCOVER the Business Process

EVERY REPEATING CORPORATE ACTIVITY,. E.G. “BUYING A LAPTOP FOR THE EMPLOYEE”, ”PLACEMENT OF COMPONENTS ON AN ASSEMBLY PLANT” NEEDS TO IDENTIFIED.

MODEL the Actions and Participants

THE DISCOVERED CORPORATE “BUSINESS PROCESS” IS MANIFESTED IN THE BPMS. THE MANIFESTATION IS MODELING THE DESIGN OF THE PROCESS FLOW AND ALL THE PARTICIPANTS IN EVERY TASK OF THE PROCESS .

DEPLOY and EXECUTE the process

THE BPMS MANIFESTED BUSINESS PROCESS CAN BE COMPLETELY AUTOMATED I.E. TASKS IN THE PROCESS COMMUNICATING WITH SYSTEMS ONLY OR HYBRID I.E. TASKS IN THE PROCESS COMMUNICATING WITH SYSTEMS AND HUMANS (FOR ACTIONS). A WELL MODELED PROCESS SHOULD BE DEPLOYED FOR EXECUTION. THE ACT OF DEPLOYMENT SIGNALS THE BPMS RUNTIME ENGINE THE COMMISSIONING OF A NEW BUSINESS PROCESS. FROM THAT POINT ON THE ENGINE WILL EXECUTE TRANSACTIONS THROUGH THE NEW BUSINESS PROCESS.

MANAGE the Business Process

A BPMS MANIFESTED BUSINESS PROCESS CAN BE COMPLETELY CONTROLLED, PROCESS OWNERS ARE IN CHARGE TO INFLUENCE THE PROCESS EXECUTION AND BEHAVIOR. THE BUSINESS PROCESS OWNERS HAVE ALL OR MOST OF THE BELOW CAPABILITIES -

1. Commission a new Business Process

2. Stop & Start the Process

3. Decommission the Process

4. Ability to dynamically change the Business Process

5. Check a Process execution result

6. Track the execution path of a completed or in progress Business Process

OPTIMIZE the Business Process

“BUSINESS PROCESS VISIBILITY IS THE KEY TO BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION”. THIS STATEMENT IS LIKE A QUOTE OF WISDOM FOR THE CORPORATE MANAGER. THE BPMS OFFERS A WHOLE ARRAY OF LEVELS OF VISIBILITY INTO THE BUSINESS PROCESS EXECUTIONS. THE REAL TIME PROCESS VISIBILITY IN ORACLEAS INTEGRATION ENABLES BUSINESS OPTIMIZATIONS THROUGH THE FOLLOWING SERVICES-

1. Business Process Monitoring – A Real time view into the Enterprise processes to watch for the health of the Organization and its activities.

2. Business Activity Monitoring – Visibility to build and view the key Business Activities or performance indicators.

3. Business Process Optimization – Visibility to see the efficiency of the Processes to makes decisions on Process Changes. Allows easily change the agile processes modeled into the BPMS repository and redeployed.

BPMS Managed Business Process- An Example

DISCOVER the Business Process

THE STANDARD PROCUREMENT PROCESS IS DISCOVERED AND OPTIMIZED TO IMPLEMENT IN THE BPMS I.E. ORACLEAS INTEGRATION. THE STANDARD PROCESS(ANALYZED IN THE PREVIOUS SECTION) IS ALREADY BETTER STREAMLINED AS PART OF THE DISCOVERY PROCESS, WHERE ALL REQUISITIONS NEED NOT BE APPROVED TWICE, I.E. DEPT MANAGER AND PURCHASING MANAGER. THE BPMS ADDS AUTOMATION TO THE STANDARD PROCESS, IT DOES VALIDATION AND ONLY SENDS VALID ELECTRONIC REQUISITIONS TO PURCHASING FOR APPROVALS AND PROCUREMENT.

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1. Employee fills an online requisition form and submits

2. The BPMS based Procurement Process gets invoked to handle the requisition. Its designed to check, and forward valid requisitions to Purchasing and reject invalid ones back to the employee

3. Purchasing Manager receives requisition, validates and places a standard purchase order

iv. Invalid requisitions are returned to sender

v. The supplier selection process in the Purchasing Application suggests the preferred supplier

vi. Purchasing Manager makes a purchase order for the supplier and submits.

vii. The BPMS based Procurement Process picks the PO and routes it to the preferred supplier through the collaboration setup with the Trading Partner

MODEL the Actions and Participants

THE DISCOVERED PROCUREMENT PROCESS IS MODELED IN THE BPMS USING THE DESIGN TIME MODELING TOOL. THE MANIFESTATION IS MODELING THE DESIGN OF THE PROCESS FLOW AND ALL THE PARTICIPANTS IN EVERY TASK OF THE PROCESS.

DEPLOY and EXECUTE the process

THE MODELED PROCESS IS DEPLOYED IN THE BPMS RUNTIME ENGINE, WHICH RESULTS IN THE COMMISSIONING OF A NEW BUSINESS PROCESS. FROM THAT POINT ON THE ENGINE WILL EXECUTE PROCUREMENT TRANSACTIONS THROUGH THE NEW BUSINESS PROCESS. THE PROCESS IS A HYBRID I.E. TASKS IN THE PROCESS COMMUNICATING WITH ENDPOINTS SYSTEMS (LIKE REQUISITION AND PURCHASING APPLICATIONS) AND HUMANS (LIKE PURCHASE MANAGER).

MANAGE the Business Process

A PROCUREMENT PROCESS MANIFESTED IN A BPMS CAN BE COMPLETELY CONTROLLED, PROCESS OWNERS ARE IN CHARGE TO INFLUENCE THE PROCESS EXECUTION AND BEHAVIOR.

OPTIMIZE the Business Process

“PROCUREMENT PROCESS VISIBILITY IS THE KEY TO PROCUREMENT OPTIMIZATION”. THE REAL TIME PROCESS VISIBILITY IN ORACLEAS INTEGRATION ENABLES BUSINESS OPTIMIZATIONS THROUGH THE FOLLOWING SERVICES-

• Business Process Monitoring

• Business Activity Monitoring

• Business Process Optimization

Real-Time Business Process Monitoring

. With the Procurement Business Process implemented in the BPMS solution now lets see the real-time visibility in the Organization. The below is a sample of top process monitoring queries that Managers struggle to get answers to everyday-

|Employee : |

|1. What is the current status on my Requisition? YES, the employee can check current status of his requisition in the procurement process |

|2. How long did it take to order a new laptop by anybody in my Department? YES, the employee can query past requisitions processed by item, and check |

|the total elapsed time of the process. |

| |

|Department Manager : |

|1. What is the current status on all the Departments Requisitions? – YES he can track where the Dept requisitions are in the Procurement Business |

|Process. |

|2. What is the total cost in supplier orders raised for my Dept this month and YTD? – YES, he can do this in Real-time to make a decision on approving a|

|new major expense in the Dept. He can monitor cumulative cost for month to date or YTD. |

| |

|Purchasing Manager : |

|How many invalid requisitions were sent and rejected by Purchasing for a particular Dept this month to date? – YES, since all rejections are modeled in |

|the BPMS and they either are by the Process for validity reason or by Purchasing Manager. |

|What is the status on all the open requisitions for purchase? – YES as Purchasing has full visibility to know how many requisitions have been already |

|put into the procurement process by various departments. |

| |

|VP of Purchasing |

|What is the average time taken to handle a requisition? – YES the Management can exactly see the average time across processes executed, and check the |

|time taken to approve a requisition and dispatch a PO. |

|Can we Improve or Optimize the Procurement Experience (or Process)? – YES process efficiency is tracked, hence all the information needed for Process |

|Optimization can be provided. |

| |

|Chief Operations/Process Officer |

|Can I monitor the Corporate Procurement Process end–to-end any time of the day? – YES he can track any Corporate process and see all the instance of its|

|execution and drill down to see tasks done on a specific requisition. |

The Business Managers in a BPMS now have the answers to the above questions and similar hundreds more everyday in real-time to take the Enterprise to the next level of success and, and also sustain their current success levels and efficiencies in the competitive industry environments.

OracleAS Integration – BPMS and Beyond

Business process integration (BPI) is the vehicle finally for Corporations, for achieving sustainable value & accelerated growth. Early BPI projects have established in the Corporate and IT world that a Enterprise Integration Platform is needed based on Business Process approach. Business Process Driven Integration makes the Enterprise quickly foster revenue growth, increase customer satisfaction, facilitate e-business deployment and meet cost-reduction targets. Specifically, BPI enables functional integration across segregated business units, extends vertical process management into supply and distribution chains, and provides companies with e-business integration capabilities. In other words, BPI allows previously silo-ed business units to work in synthesis, enables business units to integrate processes with external entities and consolidates redundant processes across functional areas. This results in an enterprise that is more efficient and effective, which in turn drives up revenues and drives down costs.

Event driven business process integration takes a product approach to integration. Based on a sound and holistic set of integration concepts, an event driven business process integration product establishes a consistent and normalized Metamodel that the product uses for defining and executing integration. This is exactly the approach offered by OracleAS Integration. OracleAS Integration extends comprehensive BPMS capabilities with its Business Process Integrator at the core, designed to be used both by Business and IT people. It focuses on the three pillars of Enterprise Integration i.e. Business Process Management, Endpoint Management, and Data (or event) Management.

Business Process Management

BUSINESS PROCESSES ARE THE HEART OF THE CORPORATE WORLD. WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN HOW CORPORATIONS HAVE GROWN TO BE WHAT THEY ARE ONLY BECAUSE OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PROCESSES. BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT ALLOWS TO DISCOVER AND DESIGN THE EXISTING ENTERPRISE PROCESSES USING A MODELING TOOL. THE BPMS WILL STORE THE MODELED PROCESS IN ITS METAMODEL FOR EXECUTION AND FURTHER RE-DISCOVERY AND OPTIMIZATION. ITS AN EXCELLENT TOOL FOR IT TO OFFER BUSINESS OWNERS, TO DIRECTLY DESIGN AND MANAGE THE BUSINESS PROCESSES THAT THEY OWN, RATHER THAN IT BEING CHARTERED THE JOB TO FIGURING OUT THE TASK TO FIND A WAY TO DEPLOY THE IDENTIFIED BUSINESS FUNCTIONS. AT THE SAME TIME BUSINESS OWNERS FOR ONCE FEEL CONTROL OF THE PROCESSES THEY OWN AND INFLUENCE, RATHER THAN JUST BEING THE USER OF THE IT PROVIDED SYSTEMS.

OracleAS Integration offers Business Process Management that allows to design the Enterprise processes independent of the specifics of the Endpoint participants and their requirements. Hence the Business analyst can model and store a metamodel of the Process and let someone else worry about the integration of the actions in the process to the endpoints. The rich Process Modeler tool allows web-based access to model business exceptions and error management. The Modeler captures and stores the process metadata in a form that facilitates real-time monitoring and enables finally process optimization.

Endpoint Management

BUSINESS PROCESSES ARE JUST A COMMON LOGIC SEQUENCE OF RULES OF WHEN AND HOW CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS CAN AND SHOULD TAKE BUSINESS ACTIONS. AS SEEN IN EARLIER SECTIONS PARTICIPANTS IN A BUSINESS PROCESS ARE EITHER SYSTEMS, EMPLOYEES, OTHER PROCESSES OR THE CORPORATE TRADING PARTNERS. ORACLEAS INTEGRATION ALLOWS BUSINESS PROCESS PARTICIPANT PROFILING I.E. TO IDENTIFY, DEFINE AND PROVISION PARTICIPANTS TO PROCESSES. FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATOR ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT IS TWO-PRONGED 1. PROFILING PARTICIPANTS AND 2. MANAGING CONNECTIONS TO THE PARTICIPANTS. CONNECTION MANAGEMENT IS THE MECHANISM OF PROVIDING META INFORMATION OF THE EXACT PROTOCOL OF CONNECTIONS TO THE ENDPOINT. THE COMPREHENSIVE ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT IN ORACLEAS INTEGRATION LETS THE PROCESS MODELER CONNECT ANY KIND OF PARTICIPANT TO ANY ACTION STEP IN THE MODELED PROCESS. I.E.

• People

• Enterprise systems

• Trading Partners

The support for various Trading Partner connectivity ebusiness standards like RosettaNet, EDI etc allows to integrate the B2B collaborations into the Enterprise Processes. The Participants and their Connection channels can be shared and reused across multiple business processes. Every Participant is bound to a business process by an electronic agreement between the two to ensure an association of the two independently modeled pieces of Metadata, and, this adds a needed layer of validation and security.

Event or Data Management

ORACLEAS INTEGRATION OFFERS ALL THE COMPREHENSIVE NEEDS OF DATA INTEGRATION I.E. TRANSLATIONS, TRANSFORMATIONS, VALIDATIONS ETC NEEDED FOR EVERY COMMUNICATION BETWEEN INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS. THE PROCESS APPROACH TO MODEL BUSINESS PROCESSES AND INTEGRATE ENTERPRISE AT THAT LEVEL MAKES THE COMPLEXITIES OF DATA INTEGRATION HIDDEN FROM THE BUSINESS USER. ORACLEAS INTEGRATION CAPTURES AND COMMUNICATES DATA BETWEEN PROCESS ACTIONS IN THEIR REAL WORLD REPRESENTATION OF BUSINESS EVENTS, RATHER THAN IT FIELDS OF DATA AND RECORDS. THIS EVENT DRIVEN PROCESS INTEGRATION IS INTUITIVE TO THE BUSINESS USERS AND ALSO ALLOWS HIM TO LEVERAGE IT FOR BUSINESS PROCESS OPTIMIZATION. INSTEAD OF FOCUSING PRIMARILY ON TRANSACTIONAL SUPPORT, ORACLE PAYS SPECIAL ATTENTION TO DETAILS FOR LOOSELY COUPLED SYSTEMS. EVENT DATA SENT OR RECEIVED IN A BUSINESS PROCESS FROM A PARTICIPANT ENDPOINT CAN BE IN ANY FORM THAT IS TRANSLATED AUTOMATICALLY AND TRANSFORMED AS PER MODELED RULES INTO BUSINESS EVENTS NEEDED TO EXECUTE THE ENTERPRISE PROCESS.

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As seen in the Service Architecture Model above, OracleAS Integration provides additional service modules besides the ones needed for a Business Process Integration Platform. I.e. Trading Partner Management and Business Activity Monitoring. Trading Partner Management is a full-blown service to manage all the Enterprise Trading Partners and the business collaborations and connection protocols maintained with them. Business Activity Monitoring is fast growing service offered by Business Process Management and Integration vendors to add value to business visibility in real-time.

Streamline Business Processes

Ongoing and real-time monitoring of processes is crucial for better operational efficiency. A BPMS becomes a critical knowledge center for the Corporation’s entire operations. Immediate knowledge of how moving processes are affecting performance provides the critical means for improvement. Sound decisions rely on an ability to react and support new processes, changes to existing processes, and termination of faulty processes. Monitoring the health of the process environment helps leaders make such informed decisions. These decisions are also informed by acquiring intelligence about how your business handles its processes or reacts to change. This requires rich, analytical processing —executed in multiple dimensions —across multiple categories such as time, speed, quantity, etc. BPMS is a strategic control center for managing the requirements built into service-level agreements, process optimization, customer service, and partner guarantees. Though Business Intelligence capabilities that offer multi-dimensional and historical views are essential, the accurate real-time analysis quickens time-to-market. Controlling, optimizing, and guiding the business in light of process fulfillment enables quicker reactions to change and improved resource allocation.

Path to Business optimization

Almost all large companies have implemented enterprise software applications, most still have room for enormous improvement surrounding their business processes, which will ultimately have a positive impact on their bottom line. By using the key concepts for Business optimization, processes executed in a BPMS environment, a company can interlace their software packages into an infrastructure that more closely represents its way of doing business. This approach will be more responsive to changing business conditions, will optimize their investments in enterprise software, and will see rapid, positive results in their bottom line.

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The above figure shows the “Pyramid of Business Optimization”. An Enterprise Integration platform enables this Pyramid by binding all the business functions and knowledge seamlessly together. Corporations have mainly Business functions embedded in

• Systems, either Packaged or Legacy applications,

• Employee procedures and actions

• Trading Partners (Suppliers, customers etc)

• Localized processes

“Business Process Integration” is the process driven approach to Enterprise Integration enabled by OracleAS Integration. The OracleAS Integration based Integration platform is well aware of all the building blocks of the Enterprise Processes and the rich business evens implemented within it.

Based on the Enterprise Process Integration Platform deployed using OracleAS Integration, the Corporation can progress to the level of the pyramid to “Business Process Monitoring”. It offers real-time End-to-End step-by-step Process Monitoring directly to the Process Owners and other interested parties. Corporations that had to rely on IT reports and offline Data warehouses for business now have an option to do more, and hence offer more to their customers. This is a distinct competitive advantage that every Corporation is working on building.

Enterprises who are the early users of Real-time Process Monitoring, realized that Technology could do more for them to move further on the pyramid towards the optimal Business model. “Business Activity Monitoring”(BAM) allows to delve down into the content of actual process instance events in real-time to get indications of what coming and be prepared with planned actions. Business managers now found in BAM now found an option to rather being reactive to business problems, they can anticipate them and proactively expect them and even prevent them. This sounds too good to be true but many analysts who have seen the early adopters experiment with it, have now endorsed BAM as the tool with an impact to change how business is done forever. OracleAS integration provides basic flavors of Business Activity Monitoring for those who want to start working up on the pyramid early.

Finally “Business Process Optimization” depends on true deployment and active use of the previous layers of the pyramid . Corporations who have worked up the pyramid activating each layer of the pyramid step by step and reaping is benefits, will already see early signs of Business Optimization .The final thread is being able to measure and associate metrics to the Enterprise processes. Process efficiency being the most obvious metric i.e. time taken for a process flow to execute either from end-to-end or between any 2 points. OracleAS Integration enables Business Process Optimization by enabling real-time measure of process efficiency.

Lets see the Real Time Monitoring example in light of the pyramid of business optimization. We will tag questions with the layer of the pyramid that can help answer it.

|Employee : |

|1. What is the current status on my Requisition? Business Process Monitoring |

|2. How long did it take to order a new laptop by anybody in my Department? Business Activity Monitoring |

| |

|Department Manager : |

|1. What is the current status on all the Departments Requisitions? – Business Process Monitoring |

|2. What is the total cost in supplier orders raised for my Dept this month and YTD? – Business Activity Monitoring |

| |

|Purchasing Manager : |

|How many invalid requisitions were sent and rejected by Purchasing for a particular Dept this month to date? – Business Activity Monitoring |

|What is the status on all the open requisitions for purchase? – Business Process Monitoring |

| |

|VP of Purchasing |

|What is the average time taken to handle a requisition? – Business Process Optimization |

|Can we Improve or Optimize the Procurement Experience (or Process)? – Business Process Optimization |

| |

|Chief Operations/Process Officer |

|Can I monitor the Corporate Procurement Process end–to-end any time of the day? – Business Process Monitoring. |

In the next sections we will see in detail an example from the above list for each of the three layers to Business Optimization and put it in perspective.

Business Process Monitoring

Salient Features-

1. Effective and quality “Business Process Monitoring”(BPM) is only possible, and reflects the corporate real-time picture, when implemented over a Enterprise Business Process Integration Platform.

2. BPM provides Real-Time process state information (commonly in a console) that shows processes in progress, completed processes, and associated metrics.

3. BPM is not about system administration, which is about infrastructure resources and systems status.

4. Normal or Exception process flows are all visible through BPM.

5. BPM is not restricted by language, geography, size and extent of the Business Process in question.

6. The scope of a process, its step of actions and all its participants are all shown in real time when monitoring a Process.

7. BPM is not about slicing and dicing the business events used and created for a process. I.e. event analytics.

Example –

Lets see how Business Process Monitoring helps answer the Department Manager’s query on a daily basis

What is the current status on all the Departments Requisitions?

Assuming the Corporation has deployed a Business Process Integration Platform like OracleAS Integration , and implemented the Procurement Business Process using the BPMS. The Procurement process owner has modeled the process design and deployed for execution. Now if the Process Owner grants access to the Department Managers who participate in this Process, each Dept Manager has the ability to track requisitions raised into the Corporate Procurement Process. The above diagram shows on the left the Procurement process design from a BPMS modeling tool, and, on the right the Process monitoring tool shows the current execution state. Now the Department Manager is able to see exactly how far has the Process executed that was initiated by a requisition from his department. The example shows steps in the process executed in yellow frames, hence one can monitor that the requisition was checked and found valid and sent to Purchasing for action , and is now waiting on the response. Hence the Dept Manager can see process instances waiting on Purchasing to take action (approve and raise PO or Reject), and the visibility allows him to monitor important requisitions and if they take too long for a Purchasing response he can escalate it to the Purchasing Department.

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Business Activity Monitoring

Salient features-

1. A Real-time Corporation tool to compete by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays in managing and executing its business processes

2. BAM allows Business Managers to detect earlier and respond faster.

3. Leverage the event driven Business Process Integration Platform by filtering and processing events in Real-Time.

4. BAM with time learns and gets better in its in time alerts and predictive style, it goes from reactive to proactive to eventually adaptive.

5. BAM technologies can source business knowledge from alternative sources besides the Integration Platform repository.

6. BAM can installed and setup by IT , but can be implemented and optimized only by Business. It’s a Business tool and has to be run and managed by Business.

Example –

Lets see how Business Activity Monitoring helps answer the Department Manager’s query on a daily basis

“What is the total cost in supplier orders raised for my Dept this month and YTD?”

This is a typical question in every Department Managers and many Business Leaders mind. Corporations want to have a handle over the costs and be in complete control, to alter its course on a daily basis. Many corporations are trying to do the same for many years, most recently deploying enterprise Portals and executive dashboards. The importance is on the Real-Time aspect, Managers need to know the status of the business operation in question, right to this very moment.

In our example the Department Manager e.g. VP of Manufacturing, has an annual budget $12 Million dollars. The Suppliers to the Dept are set up in such a way that the Corporation can buy at the best prices all the year round from multiple regions at various times of the year. The Manager wants to ensure no more than a Million dollars purchase is done in a month. It has been impossible in the past as the management found after the fact that they bought raw material worth in a month for 3 Million dollars because they were getting a good price. But later either the deliveries were late or the delivered raw supplies expired in the warehouses as they were too early. This led to losses to the corporation. The Manager now has the capability to set an activity monitor in place to ensure the total cost of requisitions per month does not go over a $ 1M, though its within budget for the Department for the year. This allows him to balance purchases and roll them over the year to ensure they get the supplies from the right suppliers at the right time at the right price.

The BAM tool allows to setup an activity to monitor i.e. total on requisitions should not be above 0.8M dollars before the 27th of the Month. This allows the Manager to be informed if the monthly total is close to Million before 27th, as it will be close to the Million every month around the last 2 or 3 days of the month. If the Manager gets the activity monitor to report in real-time that on 20th of a month the requisition total is at 1.5 M it allows him to -

• Proactively prevent further purchases before he misses targets

• Hold current open requisitions in Purchasing, identify and cancel them if required

• Always Detect Early & Respond Quickly

Business Process Optimization

Salient features-

1. Business Process Optimization (BPO) is the ability to uncover process inefficiencies and identify its cause, when the Processes are implemented in a BPMS.

2. BPO helps optimize processes to reduce response time and expedite decision-making.

3. BPO provides decision makers with the necessary data to make quick, informed decisions on cross-functional nature of most business processes.

4. BPO is incomplete if it’s not well supported by the BPMS to easily change and measure change impact on the processes implemented.

Example –

Lets see how Business Process optimization helps answer the VP of Purchasing query on a quarterly basis

“Can we improve or optimize the Procurement Experience?”

The VP of Purchasing is the owner of the Procurement process, and wants to ensure that every quarter he has review of the quarter of the procurement experience from each Department placing requisitions into this Process. The Process Owner runs the Process Optimization Monitoring tool to see how is the process performing, breaks down the process flow steps and see for any issues and trends of inefficiencies. For example if he drills down on the response times between the two points in the Procurement process, where a requisition is sent to the Purchasing system and a response is received back to the BPMS from Purchasing. In this instance the Owner sees that the average time taken is increasing from 1 to 2 days. The Purchasing SLA is to respond in 1 business day. Next the VP tracks the average cost of the requisition and sees 80% of the orders are less than a $ 1000. Hence the Corporation decides that the BPMS will create Purchase Orders for Requisitions less than $1000, rest will continue to go to Purchasing as usual. This will help Procurement performance in a big way and improve the process efficiency corporate wide. Hence the below revised process is quickly changed in the modeling tool and redeployed for runtime execution.

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