AYTS: Summary of Oracle BPM Suite presentation

Recently started the Oracle program: Are You The Smartest.
For me it is an opportunity to test my current knowledge level and to extend my knowledge.
After every session I follow, I will write a brief summary as part of the preparation for the test.
I also follow some of the 2012 sessions. These sessions are not part of the test.
I will continue with the summary of the following session.

ARCHITECTS TRAINING – SERVICE INTEGRATION – Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite presentation

This session (this is the third and last session I followed of the old series) was divided into the following two parts.

• Overview of the BPM Suite (2 hours)
• Best practices on Application Integration (45 minutes)

Overview of the BPM Suite

In this presentation the different parts of the BPM suite will pass. It is especially of interest for people who like to know what the BPM Suite is on a high level and to get some ideas where it can be used for.

The Challenge

How to ..?

• … orchestrate multi-channel customer interactions?
• … automate processes across applications?
• … easily modify such processes?
• … make relevant business insight available to the masses?
• … make upgrade safe customization to applications?

According Gardner 80% of IT spending is on maintenance and only 20% on new projects.

The Result

When business conditions evolve faster than the company’s ability to change and respond…
… business performance suffers

What is Business Process Management?

An explicit approach to modeling, automating, measuring and optimizing business processes across organizational divisions, systems and applications

BPM Benefits

End-to-end Optimized Processes.
Real-World Business Processes span organizations, systems, and applications.
BPM models, simulates, executes, manages, monitors, & optimizes those Business Processes.

In practice we have different tools, different people, but the all work on the same single process model. This model is stored in the MDS.

In Business it often happens that you like to step back and repeat some activity.
Even though it is possible in BPEL it does not really supports this. BPM does support this.

Some note for this picture:

• BAM for Fact Based Discovery – Analyze Transactional Apps, Data Stores, and Logs
• Modeling Space – Collaborative Process Discovery & Modeling (individual possibilities depends on authorization)
  • Drill down into Process Composer
  • Track improvement tasks including links to all relevant information
  • Use Wikis to collaborate
  • Manage all discovery documents
  • Discuss with stakeholders
• Visio en XPDL models can be Imported (translated to BPMN)
• Process Composer – Business Analyst Driven Process Modeling
• Collaborative modeling in Process Composer (collaborate, share, snapshots, history)
• Business IT Collaboration (JDev) – Single Model From Modeling to Execution.
  Role based functionality. E.g. a Business Analyst does not see any technical details but only a catalog with implementation artifacts.
• Simulation (Queue Buildups and What-ifs, Rich set of Charts. KPI’s)
• Process Spaces – Work Space
  • Business users can edit page and add additional components such as BI dashboards
  • Launch Instance (Case) specific collaboration space
  • Use collaboration technologies and content management to share best practices
• UCM Integration –  Tight integration with Content management systems

Visibility from different viewpoints

Continuous Process Improvement with Integrated Process Analytics

Roundtrip Simulation and BI Integration

• Proactively detect exceptions and spot “common” problems across processes
  • Adapt business process based on current conditions
  • Take corrective action to avert crisis using real time monitoring.
• Enable Performance, Productivity and Workload balance analysis as well as Business metric level reporting
  • Automatic creation of Process specific Views for mapping to BI Model
  • Process Specific views provide access to data across process versions. Ex: Process Performance, Task Performance , Process Workload etc
• Roundtrip simulation
• Historical trend analysis using BI

Differentiators

• Simple, unified platform for all process types:
  • System
  • Human
  • Document
  • Business Rules
• Progressive refinement (different roles, different tools –> one model)
• Simple to Sophisticated is a Continuum : No Trade-off between Ease-of-Use and Complete
• Foundation for Next-Generation Oracle Apps and FMW

Sales Quote Demo

The demo gave a detailed explanation of the process.

Best practices on Application Integration

Lot of the things told in this presentation where also part of the first two presentations of this track.

Key Factors Impacting Integration Projects

• IT Budget
  • IT is being asked to Do more with less!
• Organization
  • People
    • Broader distribution of teams
      • Geographic
        • Mergers and Acquisitions
      • Organizational
        • Outsourcing
    • Cross-functional “sharing” is challenging
  • Processes
    • Inconsistent means for communicating goals, objectives, options & alternatives
    • Inconsistent means for performing reviews, approvals
    • Lack of process alignment between teams – resulting in a lack of common deliverables or milestones
    • Still many manual, error prone processes
• Applications
  • Mix-and-match solutions according to specific functional requirements
  • Assumed burden of integration
  • Integrated processes across functions
  • Integrated sub-processes within the Suites only – ERP, SCM and CRM 
  • …leading to Integration Challenges
    • Data Model Differences
    • Functional Configuration Differences
    • Business Process Differences
    • Customization & Extensions
• Technologies

Right-size the Architecture

• Over Engineered Integration Flows
  • Keep service hops to a minimum
  • Strike the right balance between loose coupling and performance
  • Too many hops also lead to out of sequence messaging if not taken care of
• Sync & Async – Incorrect Usage
  • Avoid combination of sync and async
  • Customer reported issues in a cluster – root caused to affinity during callback
  • Other issues include sync part timeout, correlation issues, error handling issues etc
• Transactional flows are not for data migration
  • Transactional message processing designed to support flexibility, extensibility, validation, etc.
  • Introduces overhead not required for initial data migration
  • Consider an ETL tool instead

Performance Testing

• First thing dropped from integration projects
• One of the more critical aspects of gaining operational “insight” and experience – including error handling and reliability of the integration design
• How come doesn’t Oracle tune it?
  • Because it’s impossible to ship a perfectly tuned system
  • Too many unknown factors like
    • Hardware Platform and Operating System combinations
    • Storage Technologies
    • Available hardware resources such as CPUs and memory
    • Single node vs. Cluster
    • Deployment (what runs where?)
    • Nature of pre-built or custom-built code (e.g. sync vs. async)
    • Unknown set of integrated systems
• Performance Monitoring and Tuning is a continuous process
  • Know the knobs
    • JVM level, Weblogic/OC4J level, SOA Infra level, SOA Component level (BPEL, Mediator(ESB), Adapter)
  • Don’t forget to tune the database!
  • Use monitoring tools, review logs and debug reports proactively – Prevention is much better than cure.

Environment Preparation

• Automate Early
  • No one installs & deploys only once
  • Understand requirements for scale & invest in topology to allow for high-availability and scale regardless
  • Automation of the install process can positive impact ALL integration projects
  • Do’s and Don’ts of Virtualization
  • Understand the role of source code control within the environment landscape
• Install Accelerator Scripts
• A good environment topology