Preface

The implementation and optimization of business processes have become high priorities for most enterprises. However, experience has shown that there is a huge gap between the implementation of a single business process and the definition of an enterprise-wide process-driven architecture that will be able to accommodate business processes over time, while ensuring the benefits of concepts and best practices, including reusability, loose coupling, flexibility, discoverability, and so on.

Experience has shown that only projects based on key design principles and best practices are successful. This book presents the key design principles for process architectures in a practical way via examples, using Oracle BPM and SOA Suite 12c.

This book is a design handbook. It provides you with the skills to successfully design, implement, and optimize business processes on top of SOA. Starting with business process modeling, it shows design principles to architect sound process architectures. It presents best practices to model business processes using BPMN, together with design principles to design and implement services (SOAP and REST) and extending through to composite applications.

It provides a detailed coverage of how to prepare business processes in BPMN for execution purposes on process servers and when to use BPEL. An in-depth explanation of human interactions is given, including different patterns, escalations, renewals, and other important concepts.

Business rules are covered, including principles and best practices to use rules in BPMN and BPEL processes. For scenarios where classical human interactions and rules are not sufficient, the book explains Adaptive Case Management.

Extending the reach of business processes to mobile devices and ensuring multichannel and omnichannel interactions are covered and explained.

Finally, business activity monitoring, event-driven architectures, and complex event processing in relation to business processes are explained. Here, it is not only shown how to monitor KPIs and do process analytics, but also how to enable integration with events and Internet of Things devices.

The design principles and best practices are demonstrated in a practical way on a rental car use case, called Rent Your Legacy Car, which is used for demonstration purposes through the chapters. Each topic is explained in detail and supported by examples that allow you not only to understand the principles and practices, but also to learn how to use and apply them in practice. Each chapter builds on the previous chapter, assuring a continuous flow and coherent reading experience. The reader will not only learn design principles and best practices, but also learn how to apply them through the Rent Your Legacy Car use case, which is used in all chapters. In the book, the latest Oracle BPM and SOA Suite 12c are used. The principles are, however, relevant for all process-driven architectures regardless of which implementation platform is used, on-premise or cloud based.

In this book, you will learn the following:

• Design principles for modeling business processes and business architectures
• Best practices to produce executable business processes in BPMN
• Principles for designing reusable services and composite applications
• Advanced approaches to human interactions in business processes, including patterns and advanced case management
• Business rule management and principles for rule design and implementation, including using rules in the BPMN and BPEL processes
• Preparing process application for mobile and multichannel/omnichannel
• Business activity monitoring and principles to define and monitor key performance indicators and using these for process optimization
• Extending the processes to Internet of Things devices and processing complex events