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Defining Process Orchestration

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Outline the basics of Process Orchestration

Process Orchestration

SAP Process Orchestration is a package solution that combines the power of SAP Business Process Management (BPM), SAP Business Rules Management (BRM), and SAP Process Integration (PI) into a single, integrated solutions.

Features of SAP Process Orchestration are:

Based on single stack Java.
Is a Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard.
Is a graphic configuration that uses integration flows.

The solution consists of the following components:

Business Process Management and Business Rules Management: BPM and Business Rules Management allows you to design, execute and monitor business processes and business rules. Both tools are part of the SAP Composition Environment.
Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX): AEX provides the connectivity capabilities of the Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE) as well as design and configuration tools (Enterprise Service Repository and the Integration Directory) to set up integration scenarios.

The figure illustrates the architecture of SAP Process Orchestration.

Tools for Modelling are:

SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (NWDS): SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio is an Eclipse-Based Tool, for modelling Business Process, Business Rules, as well as Integration Flows on the AEX. For this purposes, NWDS offers a couple of perspectives, for example Process Development perspective, Rules Composer, Process Integration Designer perspective or Enterprise Service Repository perspective.
Business Process Management: SAP Business Process Management (BPM) lets your business and IT professionals jointly compose executable processes using standardized notation.
Business Rules Management: SAP Business Rules Management (SAP BRM) enables organizations to automate decisions by using business rules. Business users participate in and control rule definition, while business process experts model, validate, deploy, update, and archive business rules through their lifecycle. As such, IT organizations can work with business users to manage business rules that drive process flow and execution.
Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE): AEX provides the connectivity capabilities of the Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE) as well as design and configuration tools (ES Repository and the Integration Directory) to set up integration scenarios.
Integration Directory (ID): This component enables you to configure scenarios for the message exchange.
Enterprise Service Repository (ESR): This component contains design objects such as interfaces, mappings and process definitions.
System Landscape Directory (SLD): This component contains information about the software catalog (product and software component versions) and the landscape (technical systems and business systems).

Deployment Options

You can obtain Process Orchestration by installation or by adding the corresponding usage types to an existing SAP NetWeaver system. For latter, both are supported, deployment of BPM on an existing AEX system and deployment of an AEX on an existing BPM system.

Process Orchestration runs on one system. Deployment on more than one system is not supported.

The figure shows 2 different deployment options for SAP Process Orchestration.

Process Orchestration Requirements

A typical integration is built as a point-to-point solution. SAP PI tries to avoid such unmanageable constructs by a central integration engine. As a recent development, process orchestration uses an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). ESB supports a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an organization’s eco-system. In such situations, SAP Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX) plays the roles of a middleman, courier, and translator.

SAP AEX is an ESB that is responsible for implementing the communication and interaction between the software applications that are participating in the exchange of data and interacting. It is at the heart of a SOA implementation strategy.

The Duties of AEX are:

Controlling the routing of message exchange between applications.
Handling the transformation and mapping of the data and messages transferred from the source to the target system and vice versa. The message structures of the business applications on both ends of the exchange do not need to be the same.
Handling the security and conversion of the protocol between the service provider and consumer.
Monitoring the exchange of messages between the involved systems.
Managing the various versions of the services provided by the ESB.

The ESB eliminates the need for a point-to-point connection. By using smaller units of functionality exposed as services, it is possible to build composite services that consist of many smaller services combined into a new bigger service or composite application.

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