By simulating BPM Application development lifecycle, you will define the strategy, paradigm, and Use Cases. As a Process Analyst, you will use BPM Studio to create BPM Process Models. Based on these models, Process Developers will implement the BPM applications and deploy it to BPM runtime.
Using BPM Studio, a Process Analyst can do the following:
- Model business processes
- Define business rules and performance indicators
- Simulate processes
- Determine the optimal resource requirements to achieve specified SLAs
The steps to define strategy, paradigm, and Use Case are:
- Chose between BPA and BPM Suite.
If your answer is 'YES' to following requirements, then you need BPM as a tool:
- If you are concentrating only on a process and not enterprise-wide modeling
- If you have human-centric Use Cases that require flexibility and collaboration
- If you have to focus on the project at hand and not on your total enterprise
- If you have the tactical/implementation of the processes, BPM Suite works best
If your answer is 'YES' to following requirements, then you need BPA as a tool:
- If you have a strategic/pre-implementation work, such as as-is, to-be, gaps, requirements definition, and so on, BPA works best
- If you need to focus on higher-level, enterprise-wide modeling that might be done using rigorous methodologies, use Oracle BPA
- If you need the ability to model other things that relate to processes, such as systems, data, people, organizations, and services that represent the Enterprise, use BPA
- If you need models that relate not only to processes but to other parts of the enterprise, as well, use BPA
- Define modeling approach:
If it is bottom-up, then:
- Create projects in BPM Studio
- Populate projects with reusable artifacts, such as data services, and so on
- Publish to MDS—Projects or Templates can be published to MDS
- From Process Composer, check out published BPM projects
- Customize and use these projects to create new processes
Else if it is top-down ,then:
- Create high-level abstract Process Flows (blueprints) from scratch using BPM Composer
- Publish them to MDS
- Check into BPM Studio and refine them
- Deploy
- Define the Use Case:
- Determine the business requirements
- Model the required business processes using Oracle BPM Studio
- Create simulation models for "as-is" and "to-be" processes or models. Implement the processes by integrating each element of the process with backend systems and reusable services
- Compile the Oracle BPM project as a composite application
- Deploy the application to the runtime environment
- Interact with the deployed processes as part of a running business application
- Maintain and monitor the running process-based applications
You can start modeling in either BPA Suite or BPM Suite. However, as a Process Analyst, you will choose BPM Suite to model, because you have answered 'YES' to all questions asked when choosing between BPA and BPM, in favor of BPM. Along with it, BPM Suite offers predictability, traceability, adaptability, is measurable, and bridges the gap between Business and IT. As a Process Analyst, you have some knowledge of the business process and can collaborate with business users to enrich the modeling outcomes.
As a Process Analyst, in this chapter, you will probably follow the bottom-up modeling paradigm as your modeling strategy. Metadata Store (MDS) enables modeling paradigms. The MDS repository is used for creating a shared, collaborative work environment across multiple BPM Studios and process composers.
There's more...
In addition to the modeling methods described in the preceding text, there are different ways by which a Process Analyst can model business processes, such as the following:
- Implementing a modeling Use Case with Business Process Composer, by creating Process blueprints. These blueprints will be used by developers to create project templates and store them into Oracle MDS. After this, Process Analyst will use these project templates again to create projects, and finally, to deploy them.
- You can even use Oracle BPA suite to model the processes by designing the business architectures, analyzing the processes that will be candidates for BPM projects, and then creating process models and importing them into Studio to finally make them available at runtime.