Preface

Organizations find that it's the business process that constitutes the heart of an enterprise and is a differentiating factor. They've found that it's the processes that make or break an enterprise. Operational efficiency is a differentiating factor, and research shows that it's the processes that provide operational efficiency, business visibility, and agility to an enterprise. They've concluded that, for business process and business process management, Oracle BPM guarantees better decision making and faster Enterprise response by giving enterprises high visibility into business processes.

Oracle BPM, with its continuous improvement methodology, offers process automation, agility, process improvement, adaptability, and strong collaboration of business and IT, and increases predictability, incorporate measure, and provision traceability. It lowers IT costs, enables inclusion of changes faster, and empowers business and at the same time dramatically increases customer satisfaction.

Oracle BPM is meant for all types of processes. It's based on a unified process foundation, user-centric design, and social BPM interactions. Unified process foundation, powered by a unified process engine, will streamline process development, and deployment and monitoring, and will synchronize design and runtime environments. User-centric design will empower participants with the right set of tools.

Social BPM enables social collaboration with Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0, which are offered by Spaces and offer collaboration and communication. Enterprise 2.0 also offers publishing with wikis, blogs, and Mashups. Social BPM offers enterprise-wide collaboration.

Oracle BPM unifies with Oracle SOA suite and offers agility. Oracle ADF offers rich process interactions. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring offers analytics, monitoring, and end-to-end visibility. Oracle Business Rules offers decision logics, Oracle UCM offers document workflows, and AMX offers approval flow management. Oracle BPM also unifies with Business Intelligence, Complex Event Processing, and Oracle security. BPM offerings, such as application extensions and workflow consolidation drive SOA expansion.

Oracle BPM sits on top of Oracle SOA and it's the first BPMS product to execute BPMN 2.0. This empowers organizations, as what they are modeling is what they would automate and execute.

This book encompasses vision, modeling, simulation, implementation, measurement, execution, collaboration, monitoring, management, and administration of Business Processes through Oracle BPM 11g, and covers BPM unification with SOA, ADF, AMX, Workflows, Rules, WCM, and UCM through BPM 11g; and includes implementing social collaboration by Enterprise 2.0, and Web 2.0 through Spaces.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Process Modeling, starts with laying the foundation of, and demonstrating how to implement the modeling of business processes for a Use Case of a fictitious organization that needs Oracle BPM to be implemented on its site. You will learn to model business process with BPM and will uncover the BPM application development lifecycle. The main emphasis is on modeling a fictitious organization, creating business process flow, and creating and defining projects, roles, organization units, swimlanes, and data objects. It covers gateways in detail while focusing on business catalog. It includes working with MDS and publication of BPM projects to MDS. It also covers communication with external process and services.

Chapter 2, Process Implementation, emphasizes how developers implement the process. This chapter answers the question How do you move from a model to a running process that automatically routes tasks, brings right forms, applies rules, stores data, and so on? You will switch gears, and as a Process Developer, implement a running process. In this chapter we will discuss how to define interactive tasks, common interactive tasks, and to generate task forms. It also demonstrates how to create data associations, assign the outcome of tasks to data objects, and create data associations for conditional flows. The assignment of Human Tasks to different interactive tasks and implementation of service tasks are also covered.

Chapter 3, Process Deployment and Testing, looks at building, deploying, testing, analyzing, and debugging Oracle BPM processes.

Chapter 4, Business Rules in BPM process, covers applying advance routing rules in Oracle BPM processes, application of business objects, conflict resolution, gateways, and Human Tasks. Emphasizing on rules, it will explore rule containers such as dictionaries, Bucketsets, decision tables, and if-else decision components in rules and testing of rules.

Chapter 5, Human Workflow in BPM process, focuses on advanced concepts in human workflow, architecture, human workflow management in Oracle BPM, task patterns, routing, defining parallel and serial stages, skipping rules, runtime ad-hoc task assignments, approval groups, functions, task assignments, participant types, rule-based task assignments, deadline, escalation policies, and much more.

Chapter 6, Process Simulation, looks at process simulations, defining simulation definitions and models, and examines reengineering of BPM process to improve performance and analyze results.

Chapter 7, Developing a UI using Oracle ADF for BPM Process, covers ADF frameworks and describes how to build user interfaces for end-user interaction. It puts emphasis on ADF-BC components, entity and view objects, Web Service data control, and a different approach to create task display forms. You will also learn how Oracle BPM 11g sits on top of SOA and leverages Oracle ADF.

Chapter 8, Exception Management, explains the strategies of how exceptions are handled in Oracle BPM 11g, with detailed coverage of the fault management framework. It examines handling of exceptions in tasks, subprocess, and processes while covering different categories of faults.

Chapter 9, BPM & SOA in Concert, explores how Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM, in tandem, can help in enabling the success of Enterprise-wide BPM. You will witness how, together, they provide an Enterprise computing an end-to-end Enterprise BPM offering. It covers Oracle BPM and JMS interaction and defines communicating with other BPMN processes and services. Uncover Oracle BPM services and learn different ways to interact with BPM processes.

Chapter 10, End User Interaction, gives you a chance to experience the power of Social BPM and witness an Oracle offering on Social BPM. Examine social collaboration by Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0, which are offered by Spaces. Explore spaces —workspace and process space—and build a social network to collaborate, communicate, announce, blog, post, and poll.

Chapter 11, Manage, Monitor, and Administer BPM Process, provides a blueprint of how Oracle BPM and BAM work in tandem and offer process analytics. In this chapter, we examine Oracle BPM and BAM integration, provisioning of monitoring using dashboards, and the course of incorporating analytics and monitoring in BPM using BAM, uncovering business indicators, marks, counters, custom dashboards, and so on. We will see how Oracle EM is used for administering and monitoring of Oracle SOA infrastructure, and Oracle BPM.

Appendix - A, Oracle BPM - Application Development Lifecycle, covers how the Oracle BPM application development lifecycle helps in achieving process automation, agility, continuous process improvement, and adaptability, offers strong collaboration of business and IT, and increases predictability, incorporating measure and provision traceability.

Appendix - B, Approval Management, helps you to master approval management through the Oracle BPM Approval Management extension (AMX). We will examine the extension of human workflow services with complex approval patterns through Approval Management extension (AMX).

What you need for this book

To explore modeling, implementation, deployment, testing, Social BPM, and AMX using the Oracle BPM Suite through recipes in this book, you will need the following software installed on your machine/site:

• Oracle Database

• Oracle RCU

• Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle SOA Suite (includes Oracle BPM Suite)

• Oracle WebCenter

• Oracle JDeveloper

Demos and examples used throughout this chapter and book are created on Database 11g, RCU 11.1.1.5, Oracle WebLogic server 10.3.5, SOA Suite 11.1.1.5.0, Oracle WebCenter 11.1.1.5, and JDeveloper 11.1.1.5.0, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine. BPM Suite gets installed when you install Oracle SOA Suite. Update JDeveloper for SOA and BPM.

Who this book is for

If you are a BPM,Oracle SOA, or Oracle Fusion Applications - developer, designer, architect, or end-user looking to develop BPM solutions without impediments, then this is the best guide for you.The book assumes that you have fundamental knowledge of BPM.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Enter name as SalesToContractSM."

A block of code is set as follows:

CREATE OR REPLACE PRODECURE CHECKOPPORTUNITY (
OPPID IN VARCHAR2,
OPPTYPE OUT VARCHAR2,
OPPREV OUT VARCHAR2) AS
BEGIN
SELECT OPPORTUNITYTYPE, OPPORTUNITYREVISION INTO OPPTYPE, OPPREV
FROM VALIDATEOPPORTUNITY
WHERE OPPORTUNITYID = OPPID;
END;

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Open the Resource Palette, by selecting the menu View | Resource Palette"

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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