PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 Automation and Configuration Tools PeopleBook

Understanding Business Process Management

This chapter provides an overview of business process management in PeopleSoft CRM.

Understanding Business Process Management

This section discusses:

Tools for Business process management.
Considerations for choosing a business process management tool.
Delivered business processes.

Tools for Business Process Management

Oracle PeopleSoft CRM provides two sets of tools that initiate, manage, and monitor business processes.

PeopleSoft CRM Business Projects

Business projects are structured, workflow-enabled task lists. You build tasks and groups of tasks (phases) in business projects for your business processes and use the business project functionality to coordinate and track the work involved in performing these tasks.

PeopleSoft CRM delivers business projects and tasks (for both automated and manual actions).

The setup, execution, and monitoring of business projects all take place in the PeopleSoft system; no integration with another system is required.

See Understanding Business Projects.

Integration with Oracle BPEL Process Manager

The Oracle BPEL Process Manager is a plug-and-play, standard-based infrastructure for integrating systems, services and people activities into easy-to-change process flows. It orchestrates business processes that involve multiple activities taking place in disparate systems.

PeopleSoft CRM integrates with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager to provide CRM transactions the ability to initiate business processes that are developed and executed on the Oracle BPEL Process Manager residing on a separate system. From the CRM system, users can initiate business processes from CRM transactions, monitor the status of business process instances, and perform manual tasks that come in the form of worklist notifications.

PeopleSoft CRM delivers business processes and they contain activities that can be worklist notifications (which expects user input) or web services (which are used to perform automated CRM operations).

See Understanding Business Processes.

See Understanding the Business Process Monitor.

See Integrating BPEL with the CRM Worklist.

Considerations for Choosing a Business Process Management Tool

Based on business requirements, organizations can pick the business project framework, the integration with the Oracle BPEL Process Manager, or both as their choice for managing business processes.

This table shows a list of requirements that a business process may have and the tools that can be used to fulfill them (indicated by X). Consider the following as you decide which approach to take:

If the Business Process Has:	BPEL and Web Service	Business Project
Automated tasks that run on external systems	X	N/A
Automated tasks that run on the CRM system only	X (using web services)	X (using application engine programs)
Manual tasks that expect simple status update	X	X
Manual tasks that require input from users in addition to updating task statuses	X	N/A

If you plan to add new business processes to the organization and believe that they will be modified in the future to include more automated tasks and interact with disparate systems, the general approach is to use BPEL to develop the business processes because BPEL provides more features and brings the advantages of standards-based technologies. When more web services become available, they can be used to replace manual tasks to further automate business processes.

If you plan to add new business processes but none of the automated tasks occur outside the CRM system, or these tasks are primarily manual ones that require very minimal user intervention, such as selecting a status for the task in a worklist entry, business project is desirable.

Organizations can run both tools together: you can use the business project framework for existing business processes that work well as is, and new processes that contain tasks running on the CRM system only. Build business processes in BPEL and plug-in web services if they require interactions with external systems or expect users to provide more input than a change of task status.

Worklist Integration

You can build business projects and BPEL business processes to send worklist notifications to users on the CRM system.

The business project framework lets you specify a worklist notification, in the form of a workflow action, to be sent when a certain event in the business project occurs. For example, you can set up a business project for the Case component to send a worklist notification to a case assignee when all the phases within the business project are completed. Typically, the worklist notification transfers users to the status page of the associated business project, where they can assign tasks, update task statuses, initiate a transition from one phase to next, signal the completion of the business project, and so on.

You can build activities in BPEL business processes that send CRM worklist notifications, which enable users to update the status of the activities after performing them. Additionally, you can develop specific worklists to collect more information (called outcome) from users and send the result back to the activity. For example, in a credit card application business process where a credit check on customer is needed, you can build a worklist to include a field for users to enter customer's credit score, which is then sent back to the credit check activity for further processing.

From My Worklist, users can complete, delete, and forward business project worklist entries. The only valid operation for external business process worklist entries is to mark them as completed.

Note. Business projects support the sending of both email and worklist notifications as workflow actions. BPEL business processes support worklist notifications only.

See Understanding Business Project Workflow, Understanding Business Process Worklist Entries.

Delivered Business Processes

Oracle PeopleSoft CRM delivers business projects, business project components, BPEL business processes, and web services that are ready to use or can be modified to suit your business needs. With assistance from consulting, you can develop new business processes using either tool.

The CRM system delivers BPEL business processes that are defined in the Oracle BPEL Process Manager. These business processes consist of activities (tasks), which can be manual or automated. Typically, manual activities generate worklist entries for users who perform the tasks, whereas automated activities are accomplished by CRM web services that are provided through PeopleTools. You can automate activities in a business process by replacing the creation of worklists with third-party web services as you see fit. As delivered, business processes do not contain third-party web services that allow business processes to communicate with external systems. Currently, activities that run on external systems are implemented as stub business processes, and you need to replace them with actual web services that interact with external systems in your environment.