Participating in a Business Process in Oracle BPM 11g: Narration Script Participating in a Business Process in Oracle BPM 11g Hello, and welcome to this online, self-paced course entitled Participating in a Business Process in Oracle BPM 11g. My name is Rosie Piller, and I will be your tour guide for the next 20 minutes of interactive lectures, product demonstrations, and review sessions. As the title suggests, this course aims to familiarize you with what it s like to participate as an end user in a running process using Oracle Business Process Management 11g, also known as Oracle BPM 11g. Using the Player Before we begin, take a look at some of the features of this Flash-based course player. If you ve attended a similar self-paced course in the past, then feel free to skip this slide. On the left of your screen, you will find a hierarchical outline. This format enables and even encourages you to go at your own pace, which means you are free to skip over topics you already feel confident about, or jump right to a feature that really interests you, or go back and review topics that were already covered. Simply click a slide title in the outline to display its contents. However, note that by default we will automatically walk you through the slides without requiring you to use the outline. Standard Flash player controls are found at the bottom of the player, including Pause, Previous, and Next buttons. There is also an interactive progress bar to fast forward or rewind the current slide. Interactive slides may have additional controls and buttons along with instructions on how to use them. The audio narration script for this course is available from the Attachments button. This course will now pause, so feel free to take some time and explore the interface. Then when you re ready to continue, click the Next button below or alternatively click The BPM Life Cycle in the outline on the left. The BPM Life Cycle: Introduction Business Process Management is a strategy for managing and improving the performance of a business through continuous optimization of business processes in a closed-loop cycle of modeling, implementation, execution, and measurement. Oracle follows a methodology that it developed over many years of working with a wide variety of companies. Here is the typical life cycle Oracle uses for business process management. Click each phase of the life cycle to hear more details. If you re familiar with this life cycle, feel free to advance to the next slide. The BPM Life Cycle: Planning, Strategy, Analysis, Design Just as with any large project, good planning is important to the success of a BPM initiative. A company with a high level of BPM maturity goes beyond the departmental level and takes a comprehensive view of the entire enterprise namely, its goals, operations, processes, and IT systems so it can align BPM projects with business objectives. Coming out of the planning and strategy phase, you ll have a BPM steering committee, a BPM scope document, some BPM process candidates, and a BPM repository that will be used to hold requirements, data models, and various project artifacts. BPM process candidates should be high-value processes which are amenable to automation and have a high benefit-to-risk ratio. The Enterprise Architect will then analyze the technical aspects of the BPM process candidates and create a BPM Road Map. The BPM Road Map describes the current state, creates the future
vision, identifies the gaps between the two, and defines a road map to get from the current state to the desired state. The BPM Life Cycle: Model and Simulate Once the Enterprise Architects have completed their work, Process Analysts model the flow of a business process, document its steps, and define process metrics based on Key Performance Indicators and Service Level Agreements identified by business users. Models are simply a way for Process Analysts to document processes in a structured way. A model is a picture of the process, if you will, and as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. A very important and sometimes overlooked part of modeling is simulation. This involves testing the process with real world assumptions regarding staffing levels, system performance, cost, throughput, and so on. It s worth taking the time to do simulations, because it helps to run what-if experiments to see what the impact would be of, say, reducing or increasing the number of people assigned to an activity, or a sudden increase in the number of items flowing through the process. The BPM Life Cycle: Implement and Deploy After the Process Analysts have modeled the process, Developers need to implement the process. In this step, Developers refine the process model and make technical configurations so it is executable. For example, for each activity in the process, they define the necessary technical components to ensure the appropriate participants are notified when they have a task to perform. They create the forms end users will see when they participate in the process. And they integrate the process with back-end databases and other systems. After the implementation work has been done and thoroughly tested, Administrators perform some configuration tasks, and you are ready to deploy the process to run time. This is when you go live with the process, making it available to end users. The BPM Life Cycle: Execute Once the process is deployed, it is used within the business, and end users start participating. For example, a Sales Rep can enter a quote, and according to the process flow, participants are automatically notified when they need to perform a task. Some of the tasks may be performed by the system, without any human interaction, according to how the process is modeled and implemented. The BPM Life Cycle: Manage Now that your project is up and running, Administrators need to manage the deployed application, to ensure it is running properly and to resolve any issues that occur. The BPM Life Cycle: Monitor and Analyze You've come a long way, but your job is not done! Process Owners will want to monitor the running process to see how it is performing. With Oracle BAM, you can even set up alerts on abnormal business conditions, or configure automated actions when certain thresholds are passed. The BPM Life Cycle: Collaborate A key factor in the BPM life cycle is collaboration. For example, there might be several Process Analysts collaborating on a single BPM project. And Developers may need to interact with
Process Analysts in order to tweak the process model. Process Owners may want to review the process model before it goes live. And so on. The Oracle BPM Suite facilitates collaboration by providing tools that allow all parties to share the same process model. The BPM Life Cycle: Continuous Improvement As we mentioned earlier, Business Process Management is a strategy for managing and improving the performance of a business through continuous optimization of business processes in a closed-loop cycle of modeling, implementation, execution, and measurement. So this is an iterative process. Actual performance data from the monitoring phase can be fed back into the model in preparation for another round of performance improvement. Companies that take the time to do this and manage the resulting changes effectively are poised to excel. Oracle BPM supports the whole BPM process life cycle. It provides tools used by all participants in each stage of the BPM life cycle. The BPM Life Cycle: Execute Our focus in this course is on the execution of a process, once the BPM project has been deployed, the appropriate configuration has been completed, and end users are participating in the running process. RequestQuote Process Model: Introduction Before I show you a demonstration of how to participate in a running process, let s review the process flow. The process model you see here includes changes made during implementation. If you feel comfortable with how this process model works, feel free to skip this interaction and jump to the next slide. RequestQuote Process Model (initialize Quote and Enter Quote) The process is triggered when a Sales Representative clicks an application link to enter a quote. The Sales Rep in our example is the vhugo user. Before the quote forms open, there s a script task called Initialize Quote that pre-populates many fields in the quote forms with default values, to save the Sales Rep some time. For example, the Sales Rep s name might be filled in by default, or the date. To perform this task, the Sales Rep fills in the rest of the fields in the quote, including the customer s name, what product they are interested in purchasing, and so on. You ll get a look at sample forms in the demonstration later in this course. RequestQuote Process Model (Set Business Indicators) After the Sales Rep fills in the quote form, processing passes automatically to the Set Business Indicators script task. This is a system task. Based on various fields in the quote, the software sets values for what are known as business indicators, namely custom metrics that Business Users are interested in tracking and have been specifically defined as part of the implementation of the model. For example, you may want to define business indicators to track industry, discount, and potential revenue. RequestQuote Process Model (Determine Approvals)
Then, the process proceeds automatically to the Determine Approval Flow business rule task another system task. Based on business rules defined as part of the implementation of this model, this task performs two functions: it determines whether Business Practices Review is required, and it determines the list of approvers for the Approve Deal task that occurs later in the process. The rule determining the need for Business Practices Review is simple: if the discount is greater than 30%, then Business Practices Review is required. Otherwise, it is not. The rule setting the list of approvers for the Approve Deal task is far more complicated and depends on both discount and revenue. What s important to remember is that a business rule task can handle complex algorithms determining the flow of the process and the approval lists for one or more tasks in the process. RequestQuote Process Model (Perform Business Practices Review) If Business Practices Review is required (as determined in the Determine Approval Flow task), then the process flows to the Business Practices Review interactive task, which is performed by participants with the BusinessPractices role. In our case study, the jstein user has this role. Based on the outcome of that review, the process flows either to the next step in the process (namely, the Approvals gateway), or back to the Enter Quote task, where the Sales Rep could revise the quote. If Business Practices Review is not required, then the process automatically flows to the next step in the process, namely, the Approvals parallel gateway. RequestQuote Process Model (Perform Required Approvals) Before a quote can be finalized, it needs to be approved for both deal structure and terms. When the process enters the Approvals parallel gateway, two paths are executed in parallel: one that goes to the Approve Deal interactive task, and one that goes to Approve Terms. Notice that there s an exclusive gateway before Approve Deal. Some quotes do not require the Approve Deal task, so they bypass that task. Those quotes that do require that approval are routed automatically to the approvers defined previously, in the Determine Approval Flow business rule task. Note that although the Approve Deal interactive task lies in the Approvers swimlane, it has been implemented as a Complex task and is handled by the Human Workflow engine. As a result, the approvers are determined by Human Workflow, not the swimlane. Approve Terms, on the other hand, is performed by participants with the Contracts role. In our case, the cdickens user has this role. Oracle BPM automatically routes the quote to the appropriate participants. Based on the outcome of the two approvals, the quote either continues to the next task (Finalize Contracts) or is routed back to the Enter Quote task to be revised. RequestQuote Process Model (Finalize Contracts and Save Quote) If the quote is approved, the process instance moves to Finalize Contracts, which again is performed by participants with the Contracts role (in our case, cdickens). Then, the Save Quote service activity writes the quote out to the database, and the process ends. What Do End Users Do? So what do end users do? They complete interactive activities. Oracle BPM automatically routes tasks to participants based on their roles, so all they have to do is log in and perform the tasks they have been assigned. Work items automatically move through the process. The various system tasks happen automatically as well.
The Sales Rep enters a quote, if necessary someone with the BusinessPractices role performs Business Practices Review, various people approve the quote if necessary, someone with the Contracts role approves the terms and finalizes the contracts, and so on. How Do End Users Participate? To interact with a deployed process, participants can use either Business Process Workspace or Process Spaces. This course focuses on Business Process Workspace. As you ll see shortly, you can use Business Process Workspace not only to perform assigned tasks, but also to track process instances and monitor performance, workload, and business indicators. Process Spaces is a workspace built on top of Oracle WebCenter Spaces. It combines the content from the panels in Business Process Workspace with a workspace in which you can collaborate on the development of process models. WebCenter also provides various services such as document sharing, discussions, wikis, lists, links, tagging, as well as real-time collaboration services such as presence and instant messaging. Launching and Logging Into Oracle Business Process Workspace Let s take a closer look at Oracle Business Process Workspace from an end user s perspective. Business Process Workspace is browser based. To log in, navigate to http://localhost:7001/bpm/workspace. Type the user name and password, and click the Login button. Note that the WebLogic server needs to be running. Demo: Participating in a Running Process I d like to show you a demonstration of participating in a running process using Oracle Business Process Workspace. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Introduction You ve seen Oracle Business Process Workspace in action. In the time remaining in this course, let s look at some of its features. Oracle Business Process Workspace offers task management, process tracking, and performance dashboards. Click the tabs on the left for more details. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Applications Panel The Sales Quote process is kicked off by a Sales Representative, who submits a quote. To initiate the process, all Sales Reps have a link in their Applications panel, visible in the Tasks tab. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Tasks Tab The My Tasks view of the Tasks tab is the main panel showing tasks that need to be performed. You can filter instances in this panel by Assignee, by Status, or by any search terms, including an advanced search option as shown near the top. You can select which columns to display, and you can save both your advanced search and your choice of columns as a custom view, under My Views in the Worklist Views panel. When you select a work item, details for that item appear in the lower panel, and you can perform actions on that item.
Supervisors have a My Staff Tasks view as well, so they can track tasks for their staff. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Process Tracking Tab The WorkSpace Process Tracking tab shows a list of instances with which the participant is associated. If you select a process instance, you can see the status and audit trail for that instance. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Standard Dashboards Tab As its name suggests, the Standard Dashboards tab displays built-in dashboards on workload and performance. You can even drill down to instance-specific information. The dashboard displayed here is the Workload per process dashboard. In the summary chart on the left, you can see that there are 9 instances still running in the RequestQuote process. The chart on the right shows where these instances are in the process flow. Select an activity in the second chart to drill down to instance-level details. Oracle Business Process Workspace: Custom Dashboards In addition to the standard dashboards, you can also define custom dashboards based on both built-in and user-defined dimensions and measures. The chart on this slide shows discounts by revenue grouped by industry. End Hopefully you have a sense of what it s like to participate in a running business process in Oracle BPM 11g. Thanks for participating in this self-paced training, and check out the other online courses in this Oracle BPM 11g series.