PaaS Community Blog

Missing BPM plugin issue in BPM Quick Start 12.2.1.1.0 – How To Fix it by Ganesh Kumar Krishnan

With the release of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c, Oracle introduced the concept of Quick Start distributions that allow developers to install a development or evaluation environment on a single host computer. The quick start distribution is available for both Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Process Management Suite and, if you are like me, chances are, you may prefer to install them separately and independently to try out the various new features they offer. Installing them separately also helps with the performance of JDeveloper, as it could reduce the number of design time plugins loaded during the design time.

What is the problem?

When you install the SOA and BPM 12.2.1.1.0 Quick Start distributions independently, in separate ORACLE_HOMEs, but on the same machine, you may find you run into a problem where the BPM Plugin is missing from the BPM distribution’s JDeveloper IDE.The problem manifests when you launch the JDeveloper IDE from the SOA distribution (before launching the BPM distribution), and will mean that the BPM Plugin extension will not get loaded into the JDeveloper IDE, and you will not be able to develop BPM processes.

Where is the problem?

Although the SOA and BPM Quick Start distributions are different, the underlying JDeveloper IDE is the same, and both IDEs point to the same build version, as shown below. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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BPM Self Paced Business Process Composer Training by Avio

Course Description

Oracle BPM Business Process Composer Self Paced Training provides students with an understanding of the core BPM concepts and hands-on lessons on designing and modeling effective processes. This class covers essential topics for business analysts.  Because of the differences between Composer 11g and 12c, different training material is used for the two versions of the product.

Each lesson has a video to introduce the topic and to demonstrate the learning objectives of the lesson. You’re then given a hands-on exercise to do that is related to the lesson. A mentor is provided to help answer your questions and assist you with the hands-on portion of the lessons if it is needed.

A challenging case study is used throughout the class to reinforce the key learning objectives and usage of the Oracle BPM Studio and Process Composer.

Objectives

At the end of this class, students attending will be able to:

• Describe and model a business process using BPMN 2.0 constructs using Oracle BPM Process Composer
• Describe how Oracle Business Process Management Suite can help an organization discover and optimize business processes
• Execute a business process using the Oracle BPM Workspace
• Identify BPM team members and roles and how they can work together on a project
• Describe BPM best practices recommended by AVIO Consulting
• Describe how running business processes are monitored and analyzed
• Describe how the web forms used by end users at runtime can be created and tested by the business

Course Topics

Oracle BPM Suite Overview – Benefits of BPM, process modeling and process improvement.  What to expect during an Oracle BPM project’s lifecycle and who is involved in each phase of a BPM project.

BPMN Overview – Discussion of the BPMN 2.0 standard and the artifacts used to model processes followed by a case study. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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A major financial institution sought AVIO’s help to improve their trade exception handling process while receiving mentorship in the use of a new set of development tools by Avio.

Our Client’s Needs:

Our client’s existing system for handling trade exceptions was flawed. Once an exception had occurred, it was routed to the appropriate group for handling. A lack of process visibility, however, made it difficult to monitor how quickly and with what level of priority that was happening. Some exceptions “fell through the cracks” without being addressed, and the corresponding trade then remained unprocessed. The client needed greater process visibility to identify such exceptions and intervene to ensure complete processing.

The client had an established history of building their own solutions exclusively with custom code, but maintaining it had become difficult. They decided to seek help using a set of off-the-shelf development tools to address this problem as a way to wean themselves off custom code.

Our Solution:

We carefully orchestrated the exception routing process in Oracle BPM to ensure accurate and consistent handling. We used Business Activity Monitoring to deliver process visibility and provided escalation functionality to identify unaddressed exceptions. With the aging of exceptions, we provided a way to pinpoint recurring problems and potentially detect underlying issues.

Because the client wanted to interact with the new process in their proprietary, branded environment, we tied our BPM solution into their existing user interface. As they requested as well, we provided enterprise service bus functionality for robust and flexible integration.

Working alongside us from start to finish, their team gained experience with Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BPM Suite, and the use of agile development methodologies supported by Atlassian’s Confluence and JIRA. Having seen the value of agile development first-hand, they adopted the approach and have been using it since to shorten development times, keep projects moving forward, and limit code maintenance.

Business Impact:

With a precise, flexible, and transparent process in place for handling exceptions, all trades are processed promptly and efficiently to completion.

Their development team is now comfortable with SOA and BPM development and is using Atlassian’s agile development technologies to tackle projects more flexibly and efficiently. With more options in their toolbox, they can now more easily match their approach to the unique demands of each project.

After trusting AVIO to help, the client has become better adapted, more flexible, and better positioned for competitive advantage in the ever-changing marketplace. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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How to implement permissions on your activities with Oracle Adaptive Case Management? by Jan van Zoggel

When our Oracle Adaptive Case Management project started we initially used the default permissions on the case (Public, Restricted) to make sure our activities where available to the correct BPM application roles. A complex authorization model of roles, with LDAP groups, with users to allow access to the activities, but also custom UI and human tasks.

An important concept of knowledge worker automation (on which off course our whole case is based) is that the users should not be locked into rigid BPM processes (and access constraints I would like to add) which the IT department came up with. So activities on one hand would be allowed access to by all internal knowledge workers anyway, because: “hey .. they are knowledge workers and know best, right ?”

The first exception

However for some exceptions we got the requirements to only allow a specific role to a specific activity. So what we did was adding a new permission for that role and made sure that the activity was only available for that role. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Case management for the knowledge worker era by Jan van Zoggel

Companies have been using workflow and content management for many, many years. In IT we got used to the term Business Process Management (BPM) whenever we spoke of automated process execution. Not so strange since the term BPM was adopted by all the major software vendors and has received a lot of attention as “the” way to achieve process automation and integration.

There are however many different definitions of BPM, where some are technical and others are business oriented. But if we look at the Gartner definition:

Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, and optimize business processes.  A business process coordinates the behavior of people, systems, information, and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, technologies are often used with BPM. BPM is key to align IT/OT investments to business strategy

An interesting (and correct) remark by Gartner that technology is not required for BPM, however the general idea (in IT) has been that BPM equals process automation. The business process is summarized to a complete definition until the level that it can be executed as a program. The efficiency gains of automating the business process much exceed the up-front effort to fully identify it and make it executable. An effort which can initially be very large where the cost is only repaid over many instances of the process. So this approach will only work on highly predictable which is highly repeatable. It’s in some way identical to a factory production line where a huge amount of products justifies the initial up-front factory costs. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Adaptive Case Management Methodology Kit by Jürgen Kress

As part of the book Best Practices for Knowledge Workers (digital edition) we published an Adaptive Case Management Methodology. The proposed ACM Methodology is based on the five phases, which covers typical software engineering disciplines: Business Modeling, Visualization, Analysis, Design and Implementation. New software artifact models for ACM user interfaces (ACM Workspace) and ACM solution analysis and design (ACM Canvas) are also among the contributions of this work. ACM design leverages the recently established Case Management Modeling Notation (CMMN v1.1). Templates of software artifacts, developed for each methodology phase, are also presented. These support a guided outcome and ensure projects progress and success.

The methodology was developed over the past two years from work and analysis of actual ACM projects in different industries. In this dissertation, a Case Study is completely described and implemented, as a proof-of-concept for the proposed methodology. Get the kit here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Technorati Tags: SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,OPN,Jürgen Kress