Outlining Business Process Management (BPM)

Business processes are part of our daily life. Whether you order a coffee to go in your preferred coffee store or check in at the airport for your next business trip. During these activities you are part of a business process, triggering different events and providing input for specific steps.

The figure shows a simple description of a business process.

A business process always has a start event (for example ordering a cup of coffee the coffee shop) and a goal (receiving a cup of coffee). The process is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks, that produces a service or product for a certain customer. A Business Process can be divided into subprocesses.

Finally a business process consists of events (start / end events), decisions (gateways) and activities or tasks.

The figure, Key Process Meta Model Components, summarizes the components of a business process.

The following list explains further aspects of business processes:

SAP Business Suite

The SAP Business Suite provides ready-to-run business processes for 24 industries. New features and support for new business processes are continuously added, with enhancement packages that deliver innovation without disruption.

SAP Composition Environment

The SAP Composition Environment (CE) helps you to create flexible differentiating company-specific business processes. These are processes that SAP does not yet address with standard software.

SAP CE is a set of tools that gives companies the ability to compose new processes and extend core business processes. This means these composite processes are being built on top of the SAP Business Suite, they are basically extensions of the SAP Business Suite. These processes are typically agile and tend to change often.

Composite business processes can be human-centric or system-centric.

System-Centric

System-centric processes focus on integrating application core processes with third party systems. Examples of system-centric include B2B cases or the integration of suppliers and customers (covered by SAP Process Integration).

The following points apply to Composite Business Processes that are realized as system-centric:

• Integrated across business systems and services

• Integrated with human-centric processes

• Defined by technical specifications based on functional business requirements

Human-Centric

In human-centric processes, the majority of the activities in such a business process are driven by human activities. This is also where SAP’s new offerings, SAP Business Process Management (BPM) and SAP Business Rules Management (BRM) fit in. Both offerings are an integral part of the SAP NetWeaver CE.

The following points apply to Composite Business Processes that are realized as human-centric:

• Collaborative across business systems and organizations.

• Need ad hoc extensions to manage pockets of flexibility.

• Defined by functional business requirements.

Cross-component Business Process Management (ccBPM) is integrated in SAP PI and contains functions for enhanced service orchestration that are based on integration processes. An integration process is an executable, cross-system process for processing messages. It is composed of a specific flow of steps - including the sending and receiving of messages - during which the status of the process is persisted on the Integration Server.

In an integration process, you can define a specific level of process control. For example, you can specify how long an integration process must wait for further messages to arrive, or you can group incoming messages and then send them in a particular order. You can also define control structures, such as loops and process in branches that are independent of each other.

Cross-component Business Process Managements’ main scope are system centric business processes.

The figure shows a typical ccBPM scenario and how it is realized in the system.

SAP Business Workflow is the classic SAP Business Workflow within the SAP back-end system (for example SAP ERP, SAP SRM, etc.). BPM refers to the organization of business process processing as a whole. This management includes the classic SAP workflow in the SAP back-end as well as message processing on the Integration Server. SAP Business Workflow is an ABAP-based workflow engine which covers the design, execution and monitoring of processes within applications. An SAP Business Workflow ensures that the correct piece of work arrives at the correct agent and at the correct time. Therefore, among other things, SAP Business Workflow brings user-system interaction. The main scope are Human-centric processes.

SAP provides several workflows that map predefined business processes. These workflows do not require much implementation effort.

SAP Business Workflow uses the existing transactions and functions of the SAP system and does not change these functions. You can use SAP Business Workflow to combine the existing functions of the SAP system to form new business processes. The workflow system controls the business processes

• SAP Process Integration (PI)

  It is a platform for a customer to realize a SOA landscape. Using PI, customers leverage enterprise services provided by SAP and enable their existing investments in third party and legacy applications as services.

• SAP Composition Environment

  It is a rich set of modeling tools for customers to build agile and flexible applications by consuming the services.

• NetWeaver (NW) BPM

  It puts the various UI blocks and services together to create end-to-end processes that solve day-to-day problems of customers.

With the tools, content, and methodology, a customer can jump start his or her SOA implementation to build flexible applications while leveraging existing investments.

SAP Composition Environment (SAP CE) is a robust and lean standard-based platform that enables you to develop Java and composite applications from scratch and on top of existing services. With SAP CE you can realize development projects that correspond to use case Building Composite Applications of SAP NetWeaver.

SAP CE provides the following set of model-driven tools for composing services, creating user interfaces, and orchestrating processes that simplify development and increase productivity significantly:

Business Process Management needs to take into account different sub-process types. Packaged processes at the application core build the center of gravity for process standardization. Application Core Processes represent the core part of an application. These processes are stable and not frequently changed.

SAP delivers processes of SAP Business Suite Applications as well as processes of SAP industry solutions. The processes are configurable. Often business workflows are used to automate a process. Depending on the company, these processes cover 70% to 80% of all processes.

Composition and integration provide competitive differentiation by composing new processes and applications, and integrating them with business partners and legacy systems. These Composite Business Processes support strategic agility and speed to market. They cover 20% - 30% of the company’s processes.

SAP BPM enables you to model, connect, compile, deploy and maintain composite business processes. These capabilities are split into the following main building blocks:

Process Composer

The Process Composer supports all stages of process modelling from high-level definitions down to the detailed enrichment.

Process Server

The Process Server represents runtime services in BPM.

Process Desk

The Process Desk represents a building block for task management, UI and forms integration, rules definitions and event resolution.

The process composer of SAP Business Process Management is integrated into SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio as two separate perspectives. These two perspectives, Process Modeling and Process Development, offer different views over one and the same process model. Consequently, the two perspectives enable different process modeling role, for example, business analyst, process developer, and so on, and makes possible the collaboration between them.

The Process Modeling perspective is a subset of the Process Development perspective. The Process Modeling perspective offers the option of designing a process, but this process is in status Draft and cannot be built and deployed. This perspective can serve as a starting point for process modeling, where a business analyst designs the process and hands it over to a developer to add the necessary technical details. The Process Modeling perspective has a subset of the views available in the Process Development perspective, which are filtered to show only information relevant for business analyst type users. Process models created in the Process Modeling perspective are not checked for errors and constraint violations and do not contain error markers. These process models are always created in status Draft, which can be changed to Released to Build in the Process Development perspective only. The process model can be built after the Released to Build status is set.

The Process Development perspective offers a full set of capabilities for designing, implementing, building, and deploying a process. A developer can open the process, which is designed by a business analyst in the Process Development perspective, perform the required changes to make the process executable, and finally change its status from Draft to ReleasedtoBuild. Changing the status is irreversible.

A developer can also design from scratch and implement a process using the Process Development perspective as a starting point. Process models created in the Process Development perspective are always created in status Released to Build and are checked for errors and constraint violations.

SAP BPM enables companies to manage the entire lifecycle of their business processes.

The SAP BPM lifecycle is an iterative process applicable for any business process and consists of the following steps:

1. Design

   The Design involves the analysis of existing processes (as is) and design of the new (to be) processes, including the mapping to application and information architectures.

2. Model

   The model step comprises the translation of the high-level process model (UML or BPMN 2.0 describing the process at an abstract level) to the more detailed and executable model modeled in BPMN 2.0.

3. Execute

   During execution (runtime), the process is executed by the BPM software platform in charge of interpreting the BPMN 2.0 source code into an orchestrated software program.

4. Monitor

   During monitoring, running (or completed, independent of the status) business processes on the BPM platform are observed. The monitoring of the processes depends on how the business wants to collect and analyze the process data (real time, near real time, or based on historical data). Real-time monitoring is also called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

5. Improve

   This step is intended to be a continuous process on its own and uses the design and monitoring steps as input.

BPM is a method for defining an organization's workflows in order to control them and make them more efficient. BPM defines the responsible persons in an organization, what they do, and in which order or sequence.

Often, ambiguous terms are used to describe the term BPM, leading to confusion. The acronym BPM is often used for Business Process Mapping or Business Process Modeling.

For our purposes, BPM is used only for Business Process Management or, more simply, process management. The process is a series of specified activities or tasks to be executed by humans or machines in order to achieve one or more objectives. The ultimate aim of BPM is to create value to the customer, thus generating added value to the organization. BPM uses a systematic approach to run, document, measure, monitor, and control both automated and nonautomated activities so that the organization's strategic goals can be met.

Increasingly, BPM involves IT-based solutions to determine, improve, and maintain end-to-end processes. When properly implemented, modern BPM solutions save organizations significant operating and processing costs.

The use of recent BPM solutions can reduce the process costs of companies significantly. Unfortunately, it is estimated that 80% of all business processes worldwide are designed in office tools like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power Point, or Microsoft Access. Automated processing is not possible with these tools. Therefore, the acceptance of automated processing will likely not increase.

This course aims to clear up the confusion about BPM and show you how to use it for the benefit of your organization. We begin by describing the technical framework of the course and how to use process applications within a flexible architecture.

The figure, Pizza Order Example, shows a client requesting a pizza delivery. The zip code is determined through a REST service delivery location. The amount of the order determines whether or not the order should be checked.

For this process to be successful, the order is passed to a supplier, who in turn confirms receipt of the order. In this case, there are no weather-related problems to prevent delivery of the order. The delivery is accessed through SOAP and the current weather is checked through a weather service. The order is acknowledged by e-mail and accepted.

In this example, the two main features of process controlled solutions are used, as follows:

REST: Representational State Transfer, a programming paradigm for Web applications

SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol, a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged between systems so remote procedure calls can be made. SOAP is an industry standard of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C.