System Transformation Portal

Essential Characteristics of a Business Process Management Product

By William Ulrich

The importance of business process management (BPM) has grown dramatically due to the convergence of several factors. Business requirements that include enabling functional integration across segregated business units, extending vertical process management into supply and distribution chains, streamlining costs and providing companies with e-business integration capabilities are collectively driving companies to embrace BPM as a core strategy.

The most important factor, however, is the need to obtain, and the promise of BPM to deliver, more cost effective and flexible business integration than traditional approaches to enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business integration (B2Bi) can provide.

Organizations can meet these requirements by deploying BPM technology across business units and third party environments. BPM tools integrate human and machine-based processes to streamline and improve the effectiveness of customer, distributor, supplier and internal interactions. To accomplish this, a BPM product must incorporate certain characteristics as outlined in this white paper. Before discussing these characteristics, however, it is important to clarify the scope of process management and its value to the corporate enterprise.

BPM: Integrating the Enterprise
A business process is a series of actions or operations bounded by a common business purpose. In other words, a series of activities (human or automated) that need to be executed to deliver a product or service. Processes can be manual or automated, both of which are critical to the success of an enterprise. A common misconception is that business processes exist only in conjunction with one or more application systems. 

Certain vendors and even some industry analysts maintain the mistaken belief that processes exist only within the context of computer systems. While system-driven workflow management is a useful discipline, it is a subset of BPM. Application oriented workflow automation is constrained by the systems architecture defining that workflow and ignores the integration of human touch points with system-based processes. BPM products that ignore manual processes severely constrict the value of BPM within business environments.

BPM technology facilitates the documentation, consolidation, standardization, synchronization and modification of business processes. For example, a sales order triggers a series of manual tasks and automated operations involving numerous participants. Unfortunately orders are frequently late, inaccurately fulfilled or lost. Disparate users, an outsourced sales function, fragmented databases and stovepipe applications contribute to significant delays for customers awaiting confirmation of their order and product shipment.

In this example, a BPM product allows users in various locations to synchronize, track and orchestrate efforts to enter, acknowledge, confirm and process an order. Such a product provides a common front-end for internal and external users and, in turn, triggers back-end system transactions. BPM technology ensures that customer orders are processed efficiently and consistently while consolidating or eliminating tasks for the individuals and systems processing these orders.

The above example is only one of many applications for BPM technology because it is generic and can be used to manage any process in a virtual enterprise. Unfortunately, the term �business process� is quickly becoming a marketing buzzword and this can be misleading. The fact is that a number of software products claim BPM automation capabilities, but few products have the breadth and depth of functionality needed to provide scaleable BPM solutions.

Essential BPM Product Functionality
To deliver business value to an enterprise, BPM products must address process automation and integration from a business perspective. EAI tools, for example, integrate Web-based front-ends with back-end systems or legacy data structures. These tools do not address integration at the point where the business user interacts with the process and this limits the effectiveness of EAI tools in terms of the value they deliver to an enterprise.

The ideal BPM product integrates manual and automated processes across business unit, application and enterprise boundaries. This is increasingly important to organizations extending supply and distribution chain management into third party domains. The following characteristics are found within the ideal BPM solution.

End-to-End Process Management
A BPM product must manage business processes from end-to-end, allowing a business process or series of processes to function in an uninterrupted fashion from the time they are triggered until they fulfill their purpose. To support end-to-end process management, a BPM product should incorporate the following characteristics.

-       To synchronize and coordinate processes for all impacted participants, a BPM environment must be active, not passive. Under an active process management environment, processes invoke components defined within an application server. Active process management ensures that multiple process models remain synchronized within application environments and ensures end-to-end process management.

-         Process management execution capabilities should actively notify any participant whose input or approval is required before a process can continue to the next step or process.

-         Being able to maintain and track processes across human touch points and application systems allow users to track process flows and determine status of specific items. To accomplish this, a BPM tool must provide easily accessible audit trails.

-         A BPM product should include exception-handling capabilities to automatically resolve issues when a problem arises, as well as allow users to intervene in an exception situation if necessary. The handling of exceptions is an integral part of an overall effort to streamline process flows. Otherwise process flows tend to be designed to deal with the exception instead of dealing with the rule.

-         Process management must work seamlessly across the entire organization, transparently enabling the virtual enterprise.

Process Modeling & Documentation
The ability to model processes from an enterprise and third party perspective provides analysts with a comprehensive view of process flows needed to deliver customer-focused value. This capability provides management with the requisite insights needed to consolidate or eliminate processes to streamline the delivery of value to business users. Key features supporting process modeling and documentation are highlighted below.

-       A process designer provides analysts with the ability to design, document and revise business process flows. Modeling the big picture view of manual and automated tasks across a virtual enterprise is a core requirement for BPM tools. Designing a process top-down, starting with the big picture and drilling down to subprocesses, ensures that the strategy gets executed without misinterpretation.

-        The process designer should be a tool that business analysts or process owners can use, leaving IT personnel to the task of exposing and cataloging application components needed by those business processes. Putting the tool in the hands of business owners gives them the power to respond quickly to marketplace demands.

-       For the above purpose and to provide the ability to integrate with underlying technology as well as with inter-company processes, the designer must have the appropriate semantics. These semantics include such things as parametric roles, parametric sub-process invocation, notify activities and other semantics.

-         Codifying business rules requires the capacity to define conditional, unconditional and time-triggered business processes. This is an important factor in building intelligence into the process model and supports efforts to improve the efficiency and integrity of processes as they flow from user to user.

-         BPM products should also have the ability to simulate process interactions with both human touch-points and application systems. Simulation enables business analysts to ensure that the process achieves the results they desire.

-         A BPM product that supports the Universal Modeling Language (UML) facilitates fast adoption by business analysts accustomed to using UML. UML allows business analysts to model and visualize conditional and unconditional process flows.

-         BPM product interfaces and models should be as self-documenting as possible to minimize user training and reduce the learning curve required to adopt BPM tools.

Manual & Automated Process Integration
Process integration involves creating common interfaces that consolidate redundant processes for multiple internal and external participants. Business level integration delivers significantly more value than EAI solutions because disparate business users gain the consistency and efficiency of common front-ends for common processes.

-         Business users want to ensure that business rules are consistently enforced at all human touch points and application interface points. A BPM product should use graphical user interfaces (GUI) to integrate manual processes with back-end applications via links to standard component libraries, so business analysts can leverage application components without requiring assistance from IT.

-        Integrating manual and automated processes requires a BPM product to be able to communicate with directory services components to define organizations, business units, user roles, participants in those roles, their availability and associated business activities. This facilitates cross-functional identification and integration of common business activities and roles across internal and third party user domains.

-        A BPM product should assist with identifying, consolidating and redeploying redundant business rules. A key feature supporting this requirement involves a rules-based engine through which rules can be tracked, evaluated and consolidated by business analysts.

-       A BPM product should be able to automatically generate links between manual processes and back-end application systems. This requires that a BPM tool seamlessly integrate with database and middleware technologies and with component-based environments including CORBA, COM, XML and EJB.

-        Having the capacity to trigger back-end legacy system transactions is another BPM requirement. A BPM product may accomplish this using standard middleware tools or through legacy systems componentization.

Accessibility, Flexibility & Portability
BPM technology should be as transparent as possible to business and third party users. Triggering a process or responding to requests to review or authorize a process should be built into a user�s Internet environment. The following features contribute to user accessibility, flexibility and portability.

-     BPM products should be able to generate GUIs that allow business users to easily interact with the product as required. These interfaces should meld into user work environments with as little disruption as possible.

-         Analysts should be able to define business rules in an execution facility or engine that can consistently deploy these rules across user environments. Analysts should also be able to use the BPM product to modify these rules as processes evolve.

-       A BPM product should be as portable as possible. This is achieved when a product generates executable code in Java or other standard languages that run on a variety of platforms.

-        A BPM product must provide zero-latency change. In the rapidly changing business climate, it is imperative that processes may be modified and implemented immediately � on the fly � without impacting the state of any process instances currently executing.

Scaleable Process Management
Large, multinational organizations have countless internal processes as well as processes extending into supply and distribution chains, customer domains, outsourcing firms and application service providers (ASP). A BPM product deployed within these organizations should have the capacity to scale up to support numerous processes and participants.

-       Typically, a messaging based approach to implementing massive business process constructs will not scale up to meet enterprise requirements. An alternative approach is needed. One such approach is a federation of processes, each of which constitutes an active supervisory application with context switching between activities (transitions) managed in memory rather than through a messaging middleware facility. This facilitates the deployment of messaging at a more strategic, process-to-process level.

-         Process nesting, where a generalized process encompasses several granular processes, supports BPM scaleability. Users can create a global process model and then business units or third parties can nest processes within this global model, customizing the nested processes to meet internal business rules and technology choices.

-      Organizations should have the capacity to deploy processes across multiple third party environments including supply and distribution chain consortia. A scaleable BPM product supports this requirement through the ability to support large process models across different organizations.

-         BPM tools should use communication protocols and a connectivity strategy that can extend process management beyond the bounds of the enterprise to support cross-enterprise process automation and integration.

         Scaleable BPM products need to be deployed across geographic regions, third parties and industry consortia. To meet this need, a BPM product should employ standard solutions, which include conforming to the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), using Java as an underlying execution language, linking to standard component libraries and using HTML for reporting purposes.

Analysis Tools
BPM offers the ability to change on a dime. To support this dynamic level of responsiveness, a BPM product should offer the analytical tools to help business people identify bottlenecks, redundancies, waste, circuitous flows and other opportunities to streamline business processes on a rapid response basis.

-         Analysts need to track process usage patterns to streamline process models on an ongoing basis. Both real-time and historical trend analyses offer insights into process reconfiguration opportunities.

-         Analytical tools should be multi-dimensional, allowing both high-level reporting and detailed drill-downs into specifics that could yield new observations and process performance efficiencies.

-         Reporting facilities allow analysts to print trend analyses, process models and other relevant information. Management can use this information as input to ongoing process redesign efforts.

Evaluating BPM Automation Technology
The importance of various BPM product functions discussed in this white paper varies depending on the size, diversity and complexity of an enterprise. Another factor impacting the selection of a BPM product is the degree of third party process integration required. Third party integration can be very complex and require a BPM product to scale up to support very large process models.

Another factor impacting requirements is the degree of back-end application integration required. Most large companies have a wide variety of legacy, packaged, component-based, Wed-enabled, ASP and outsourced applications. If these factors are a consideration, they should be included in a product analysis strategy.

The most critical BPM feature, however, is the ability to provide business users with a product they can readily customize, deploy and use across manual and automated work environments. If business and third party users do not accept a BPM product and rely on IT to use the BPM tool, the product will fail to live up to its potential as a way to help companies streamline their business operations.