Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite

Oracle Business Process Analysis (Oracle BPA) Suite is a modeling and analysis tool targeted at business analysts. Oracle BPA Suite extends the business value of BPEL processes and fosters collaboration between business analysis and IT. It enables process owners, skilled business analysts, and architects to perform process modeling and analysis, simulation and publishing of process models. The Oracle BPA Suite further supports the execution and monitoring of these process models for IT Developers with BPEL and Oracle BAM.

Specifically, Oracle BPA Suite contains the following components:

• Architect provides process modeling using BPEL, built upon a robust service-oriented architecture, for drawing business processes.
• Publisher provides a role-based presentation of process models to a Web portal.
• Repository stores and provides concurrent access to business process models and related artifacts. IT developers can use Oracle JDeveloper to utilize these models to create SOA composite applications.
• Simulator simulates the process models based on a set of discrete events to do "what if" analysis. This simulation enables business analysts to discover bottlenecks, determine process throughput time, compare process alternatives,and quantify the impact of organization changes.
• Oracle SOA Extensions take business processes from concepts to execution by sharing process blueprints with Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle BPA enables collaboration among business and IT users by disseminating and distributing information. The business models promote rapid BPEL development by propagating business changes in real-time to IT. Changes can also apply to current work without IT losing work.

Unlike the Oracle BPM Suite, the business process models in the BPA Studio have to be explicitly promoted to be viewed with Oracle JDeveloper. This suite is beneficial when an enterprise is interested in how their organization or their business processes work, usually as part of a project to create a new process or to redesign or improve an existing process.