Migrating Oracle BPM customers to PCS – never say never by Andre Boaventura

Some of you might recall this blog post at Migrating your Oracle BPM assets into Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) that I published last year for some customers that wanted to move their assets to Oracle Cloud. However, as you likely can recall too, this was only targeted for customers that were only using BPM Composer for modeling and documentation purposes only.
Early this year, a new BPM customer in Brazil, that automated their business processes on top of Oracle BPM, came up with the same request, that was essentially to take all their assets to Oracle PaaS. However, this time, the challenge was much bigger than before, since more than just translate Oracle BPMN process to their respective notations in Oracle PCS, I had to deal with many other concerns like integration with legacy systems (EBS, Oracle DB) running on their datacenter, OSB services being called by their Oracle BPM processes on-premises, business KPIs used by Oracle BPM for integration with Oracle BAM, security issues around being needed to expose their OSB services to the internet to be able to be consumed by PCS, etc.
Initially, I thought that this could be an impossible task given all the very known restrictions and caveats for this kind of job, but even so, I decided to embark on this journey, since I knew it that I could go further, given everything I had done so far for other customers around this topic, and also due to a life lesson that I learned from my parents: “never say never”.

That said, now I am coming to you to share the outcome of that POC that I successfully finished for that customer. Happy to share the great news that I managed to figure out how to migrate Oracle BPM for process automation in a smoothly way to our Oracle PaaS services, since I managed to improve my BPM conversion framework(more details in my blog post) to be able to deal also with scenarios used by process automation in Oracle BPM(that weren’t covered in my original blog post), that turned the BPM migration process to OIC into an even more ease and streamlined task, even for more complex scenarios where automation and integration with backend systems are needed as well.

As such, I have decided to share all steps used to take that BPM application integrated with OSB, BAM and documents to our respective blueprint on Oracle PaaS.  I have recorded a series of 6 videos describing in details on how one can perform that migration to Oracle OIC and take advantage to leverage other key solutions to make a more comprehensive PaaS architecture by using other PaaS services like ICS, CEC, and Integration Analytics.
These are the videos I have recorded for this migration task:

Design Time

• Part 1 – BPM to PCS/OIC Migration: This is the first step towards generate the first BPM project to be imported into PCS/OIC. It walks you through the original Oracle BPM application(BPM Composer and Studio) and shows how to create the first migratable project on Oracle PCS by leveraging the migration framework available at my blog.
• Part 2 – ICS: This step demonstrates how to install and setup ICS connectivity agent to be used by integrations that require access to customer’s Oracle database tables. Also, it shows how to build an integration from scratch in ICS to access customer database tables and then expose them as REST services to be consumed by Oracle PCS.
• Part 3 – PCS & ICS Integration: This video demonstrates how to leverage services created in ICS to replace those from the original process created with Oracle DB adapter within a SOA composite. Also, it showcases how to link those ICS services to PCS service call activities and how to map inbound and outbound data. Also, it shows the first deployable version to be tested and run on PCS.
• Part 4 – Integration Analytics: This video guides you on how to create a Business Insight model with milestones, business metrics(measures and dimensions), assign them to their respective milestones and finally expose those milestones APIs to be consumed by Oracle PCS.
• Part 5 – PCS-Business Insight Integration: This video shows how to enable and link Business Insight within PCS and also deploy the final version to be used and tested in run-time.

Run Time

This video walks you through all products described earlier like PCS, ICS, Business Insight and CEC, but now looking from the run-time perspective. It starts showing a process instance kicked-off through a PCS web forms, then an approval by a Mobile app, integration with Content experience cloud. Also, it guides you through all default and custom dashboards created on Business Insight as well as how to monitor integrations and track process integration instances in ICS. This is a comprehensive and seamlessly integrated demo that highlights how these 4 PaaS(PCS, ICS, CEC, and Business Insight) services can work together and bring more value and benefits for customers that have the same or a similar use case.

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