How to enable automatic startup recovery in Oracle BPM 11g by Jan van Zoggel

Soa AdministrationFor some reason the default settings for automatic recovery of instances is different between the Oracle BPEL and Oracle BPMN engine in 11g. We can view and change these setting under SOA Administration in the Oracle Enterprise Manager:

Select the BPMN properties from the menu (or off course BPEL for the BPEL engine)

Click on “More BPMN Configuration Properties…”: Read the complete article here.

 

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The Top 5 Business Challenges in Financial Services. Oracle Process Accelerators as a Solution By Lance Shaw

Here at Oracle, we continue to release Process Accelerators for additional solutions.  These Accelerators help achieve process excellence faster with end-to-end implementations of common business processes.  They are Ready-to-use and extensible, and include industry specific best practices.

One common industry where Process Accelerators are used to speed the delivery of business process management solutions is Financial Services.  We’ve recently produced a whitepaper that identifies the top five business challenges in the financial services industry and outlines how adopting Oracle Process Accelerators can give a competitive edge. To get the whitepaper please visit our website.

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Manipulating Human Tasks (for testing) by Mark Nelson

A few months ago, while working on a BPM migration, I had the need to look at the status of human tasks, and to manipulate them – essentially to just have a single user take random actions on them at some interval, to help drive a set of processes that were being tested.

To do this, I wrote a little utility called httool.  It reuses some of the core domain classes from my custom worklist sample (with minimal changes to make it a remote client instead of a local one).

I have not got around to documenting it yet, but it is pretty simple and fairly self explanatory.  So I thought I would go ahead and share it with folks, in case anyone is interested in playing with it.

You can get the code from my ci-samples repository on java.net:

git clone git://java.net/ci4fmw~ci-samples

It is in the httool directory.

I do plan to get back to this “one day” and enhance it to be more intelligent – target particular task types, update the payload, follow a set of “rules” about what action to take – so that I can use it for more driving more interesting test scenarios.  If anyone is feeling generous with their time, and interested, please feel free to join the java.net project and hack away to your heart’s content.

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Process Is The New App by Leon Smiers

Process-on-the-Fly #2 – Process is the New App

The next generation of business process management and business rules management tools is so powerful that it actually can be seen as the successor to custom-built applications. Being able to define detailed process, flows, decision trees and business helps on both the business and IT side to create powerful, differentiating solutions that would have required extensive custom coding in the past. Now much of the definition can be done ‘on the fly,’ using visual models and (semi) natural language in the nearest proximity to the business.

Over the years, ERP systems have been customized to enter organization-specific functionality into the ERP application. This leads to better support for the business, but at the same time involves higher costs for maintenance, high dependency on the personnel involved in this customization, long timelines to deliver change to the system and increased risk involved in upgrading the ERP system. However, the best of both worlds can be created by bringing back the functionality to out-of-the-box usage of the ERP system and at the same time introducing change and flexibility by means of externalized ‘Process Apps’ in direct connection with the ERP system.
The ERP system (or legacy bespoke system, for that matter) is used as originally intended and designed, resulting in more predictable behavior of the system related to usage and performance, and clearly can be maintained in a more standardized and cost-effective way. The Prrocess App externalizes the needed functionality into a highly customizable application outside the ERP for which it is supported by rules engines, task inboxes and can be delivered to different channels.
The reasons for needing Process Apps may include the following: The ERP system just doesn’t deliver this functionality in a specific industry; the volatility of changing certain functionality is high; or an umbrella type of functionality across (ERP) silos is needed.

An example of bringing all this together is around the hiring process for a new employee at a university. Oracle PeopleSoft HCM could be used as the HR system to store all employee details. In the hiring process, an authorization scheme is involved for getting the approval to create a contract for the employee-to-be. In the university world, this authorization scheme is complex and involves faculties/colleges (with different organizational structures) and cross-faculty organizational structures. Including such an authorization scheme into PeopleSoft would require a lot of customization. By adding a handle inside PeopleSoft towards an externalized authorization Process App, the execution of the authorization of the employee is done outside the ERP: in a tool that is aimed to deliver approval schemes via a worklist-type of application.
The Process App here works as an add-on to the PeopleSoft system, but can also be extended to support the full lifecycle of the end-to-end hiring process with the possibility to involve multiple applications. The actual core functionality is kept in the supporting ERP systems, while at the same time the Process App acts as an umbrella function to control the end-to-end flow and give insight into the efficiency of the end-to-end process.

How to get there? Read the complete article here.

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Adaptive Case Management OTN WebCast with Danilo Schmiedel

Oracle ACE Director Danilo Schmiedel, SOA/BPM solution architect with Opitz Consulting in Germany, talks about Adaptive Case Management, Predictive Analytics, and Process Mining. Watch the video here.

To download the Adaptive Case Management post mentioned in this interview, please visit the blog post.

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BPM Workspace and Webforms customization by Bruno Neves Alves

Under the propose of a project customization customization on BPM workspace and designed webforms were applied using custom css and used as skin and as webforms theme. Its important also to highlight that a workspace skin appliance is enough to bring customization to your webforms since they will inherit the workspace skin customization, nevertheless, themes offers you the possibility to enrich that customization or even to overlap it if desired. This blog post shares my experience trying what is available today as sample from Oracle Samples site but also how I found it starting from scratch.
I have follow the following contents to achieve a full workspace and webforms customization: Read the complete article here.

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BPM 11g and Human Workflow Shadow Rows by Adam Desjardin

During the OFM Forum last week, there were a few discussions around the relationship between the Human Workflow (WF_TASK*) tables in the SOA_INFRA schema and BPMN processes.  It is important to know how these are related because it can have a performance impact.  We have seen this performance issue several times when BPMN processes are used to model high volume system integrations without knowing all of the implications of using BPMN in this pattern.

Most people assume that BPMN instances and their related data are stored in the CUBE_*, DLV_*, and AUDIT_* tables in the same way that BPEL instances are stored, with additional data in the BPM_* tables as well.  The group of tables that is not usually considered though is the WF* tables that are used for Human Workflow.  The WFTASK table is used by all BPMN processes in order to support features such as process level comments and attachments, whether those features are currently used in the process or not.

For a standard human task that is created from a BPMN process, the following data is stored in the WFTASK table:

  • One row per human task that is created
  • The COMPONENTTYPE = "Workflow"
  • TASKDEFINITIONID = Human Task ID (partition/CompositeName!Version/TaskName)
  • ACCESSKEY = NULL

Read the complete article here.

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Capgemini Global Business Process Management Report

Welcome to the Capgemini Global Business Process Management (BPM) Report. This report is an exploration of key trends in BPM as seen by CXOs across a broad selection of sectors and geographies.

BPM is perhaps at a tipping point – it’s certainly at an exciting stage in its evolution. As both an engineer and an Operational Research practitioner in my early career, and subsequently as a consultant, I have seen BPM through its development over the last 26 years. BPM has its roots in management practices such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering & Model Based Development; but the advent of the new generation of sophisticated modelling and process execution technologies has greatly enhanced BPM’s power to truly transform businesses. This has created one of the most rapidly growing and attractive market sectors for both services and technology. We see BPM as a critical management discipline that when executed against clear, cross organizational business objectives, can deliver exceptional value to that organization.

However, we also see that the potential for BPM is not well understood. Our decision to conduct this global survey stemmed from discussions with our clients. We sought to gain a better impression of their understanding of BPM, how they measure its value, and how far it is prioritized within their Business and Technology Transformation efforts. This research confirms our belief that BPM needs to be a jointly owned Business and IT discipline. It also demonstrates that it is starting to gain significant traction in the market and investments are starting to pay dividends to the early adopters. At Capgemini we are being asked by our clients to help them simplify and improve their business models and the technology that supports them and we are already seeing BPM become an integral and key part of this proposition. Business Process Management is becoming ever more relevant to both large and small organizations in the current economic climate. At a time when many different market sectors are facing slow revenue growth, customer churn and increased pressures on costs, BPM becomes a critical weapon in the battle for efficiency and effectiveness in processes.

Furthermore, in a challenging and changing business environment that is characterized by uncertainty, it allows organizations to adapt, be more agile and fleet of foot. Capgemini is seeing strong demand for BPM services in markets such as the USA, the UK, the Netherlands and France; and there are clear signs of increased interest in other geographies such as, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Australia. In sector terms, the financial services industry has led the way in BPM adoption over the recent past, driven by increased focus on customer- centricity and regulatory compliance. Other sectors, public sector, utilities, telco, retail and manufacturing are now not only catching up, but are starting o use BPM in new ways to create new business models to serve customers and outsmart the competition. The research findings also show however that this is a complex landscape, and we are not seeing adoption of BPM in a clear and consistent way. This report also looks at some of the barriers to adoption, with organizational silos being a major obstacle. Waters are further muddied by fragmented budgets, lack of clear governance and ownership and internal politics.

The objective of our investment in this research project was to shed some light on these elements with a view to assisting organizations to create strategies that avoid or at least mitigate some of these barriers to success. Management of change in such endea vours is a key part in enabling the appropriate alignment of business and technology to support their transformation efforts. I hope that you find this report of benefit in the further adoption of Business Process Management. Get the full report here.

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Online Learning Library free BPM training for everybody partners, customers and freelancer!

  • BPM Product LibrarySpecial Topics Tab A portal to free resources to help you learn about Oracle BPM
  • Employee Onboarding Process Accelerator Demo All organizations hire new employees, and helping new hires become productive immediately is important for the organization’s ROI and for the individual’s motivation as well. To do that, an organization needs to have a process in place to help determine what services the new hire needs, and to track that all of the activities needed to prepare for the new hire are performed on time. This video demonstrates how the Oracle BPM Employee Onboarding Process Accelerator helps ensure that new hires hit the ground running from their first day on the job

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BPM best practice by David Read and Niall Commiskey

At our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required) you can find best practice documents for BPM Implementations. Please make sure that your BPM experts and architects read this documents if you start or work on a BPM project. The material was created based on the experience with large BPM implementations:

Also we can support you with your BPM project on-side. Please contact us if you need BPM support!

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