BPM and Oracle

Three primary activities constitute BPM: modeling and simulation, implementation and deployment, monitoring and optimization. The business intelligence gathered from monitoring drives the optimization, which leads to further modeling, and the cycle begins anew. When executed correctly, this continuous cycle of process optimization is the guarantor of an enterprise’s responsiveness to market conditions and customer needs. (see Figure 1)

 

Figure 1. The BPM lifecycle consists of three major phases: design, execution, monitoring that work sequentially in a cycle that delivers continuous refinement of business processes.

 

Oracle Fusion Middleware comprises the Oracle BPA Suite, which performs modeling and simulation of business processes, and the Oracle SOA Suite, which delivers a state-of-the-art platform for implementation and deployment. The Oracle SOA Suite also includes business activity monitoring (BAM) tools that provide actionable business intelligence that drives the cycle of process optimization. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. The Oracle BPA Suite and the Oracle SOA Suite provide end-to-end tooling for enterprise BPM.

 

This paper examines both these suites in detail and then provides an example of their usage in a quote-to-order application.

Oracle BPA Suite

Many BPM initiatives today do not result in successful deployments because of the lack of substantive collaboration between business managers and IT. Typically, business managers explain processes with their own lexicon and through their own set of tools (spreadsheets, Visio diagrams, etc.), while IT uses technical representations and its own semantics to relate model details to specific implementation considerations. As a result, disconnects between the two sides arise frequently and business process optimization degrades into a succession of continual changes that provide little incremental improvement.

Oracle’s BPA Suite comprises an integrated set of products designed for use by both business managers and IT to model processes. The Business Process Architect and Business Process Simulator products enable analysts and IT architects to model simulate and optimize processes collaboratively and be assured that they have reached agreement on the changes to be performed. These changes can be validated in the simulation environment, which provides an early proof of concept that both sides can sign off on. This approach facilitates rapid process development and enables the quick design of responses to changing market conditions.