Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Business Process Management (BPM)
The main purpose of the BPM software is to create a system that requires complex
workflow and provide flexibility to update the workflow. Some of these process scen-
arios are order processing, billing integration, order fulfillment, credit validation and so
on. The BPM software platform is on its way to maturity.
Some of the BPM software vendors claim that businesses can make changes to the
process models and reflect the changes in the production environment without enga-
ging the IT development team. However, most of the existing BPM tools allow busi-
ness users to change the process but the IT team has to be involved in the develop-
ment and deployment. The future may be that a business analyst can make changes
to the process and then businesses can directly make changes to the production
without a detailed development and deployment process.
One of the major issues of BPM system implementation is that the software container
itself gets complex such as Oracle BPM. As shown in the following diagram, the
We-
bLogic
server platform is a Java program deployed along with
JVM
. The
SOA Suite
is a set of web applications deployed on top of the
WebLogic
server platform. The
BPM Suite
is another set of applications deployed on top of the
SOA Suite
. The
SOA
Suite
and
BPM Suite
require
Oracle Database Server Platform
as well. More pro-
grams and server platforms add more complexity and that requires high CPU and
memory to execute a process. For simple processes these tools can be heavy.
The BPMN specification has several process modeling notations for integrating pro-
cesses communication and handling exceptions, and working of arrays of data.
BPMN is a simple diagram with a small set of graphical elements that represent the
business process.
