| Oracle® Business Process Architect Quick Start Guide Release 10.1.3.3 E10030-01 |
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| Oracle® Business Process Architect Quick Start Guide Release 10.1.3.3 E10030-01 |
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The Oracle BPM Lifecycle comprises the following phases:
The first step in the BPM lifecycle is defining goals and business requirements. This is followed by the identification of key business processes that need to be translated to business models.
The next step is to define a Business Process Model to capture the business design and requirements. The Business Process Model is created using the Oracle Business Process Architect. Oracle Business Process Architect is a comprehensive modeling tool that includes modeling of business data, IT systems, and organizational structure in addition to processes.
Modeling is an iterative process and an optimal business process is achieved via collaboration among the various business stakeholders and simulation of process models. Simulation enables dynamic analysis of business processes. Simulation can be used to perform cost analysis, identify resource bottlenecks and critical paths and to locate process weaknesses. Simulation at this stage is done with heuristic data.
Once an optimal Business Process Model is reached, it can be shared with IT for conversion into an executable process. Marking the Business Process Model ready for sharing with IT automatically generates the Process Blueprint. Both the Business Process Model and the Process Blueprint are saved to the Oracle BPA Repository. The Business Process Blueprint is a BPEL based metadata format supplemented with the "annotation" support of the BPEL language. The process activities are transformed into BPEL scopes that need to be filled by IT.
The Process Blueprint is used as a starting point in Oracle JDeveloper where it is converted into an executable BPEL process that can be deployed on top of the Oracle SOA run-time platform. The IT developer can create the executable BPEL process from an existing Process Blueprint by connecting to the BPA Repository Server. A BPEL skeleton gets created and the IT developer can then add execution details to it to make it concrete.
Drag and drop BPEL elements into the BPEL process skeleton to define an executable BPEL process.
Business Process Models are usually refined continuously and the corresponding executable BPEL processes have to be kept in sync. This occurs more often during development and less often when the processes are put in production. The IT developer can merge the existing BPEL process that he is currently working on with a newer version of the Blueprint Process Model by connecting to the BPA Repository Server. The execution details for any activities that are in the merged model are the same as they were before the merge and the implementation changes by IT is retained.
The IT developer can save the BPEL processes after adding implementation details to the BPA repository from Oracle JDeveloper. The IT Developer can make minimal changes to overall structure - they can add new scopes in between existing scopes, but cannot delete any scopes that have been created by the business user. These appear as "Improvement Proposals" to the business user within Oracle Business Process Architect. The business user can accept or reject these proposals.
