The basic motive of business revolves around generating profit, and it can be achieved either by charging premium price for your offering, or by reducing the operational cost. The latter sounds logical considering the current scenario of global economic slump. A Business Process Management suite enables business owners to control the operational cost by efficient handling of business processes.

jSonic BPM offers comprehensive capabilities to manage business processes through functionalities such as designing, modeling, automating, executing, and monitoring. Furthermore, it enables stakeholders to clearly understand the objective of a business process, adequate resources required for executing it, responsibilities of actors involved in the process and  finally, to do away with its bottlenecks and associated costs.

Process owners can design, model, configure business rules, and simulate business processes through jSonic Process Management.  They can identify inefficiencies associated with a process and achieve process optimization. Industry standard business practices can also be easily incorporated in the process framework.

Now, as a process becomes optimized, its operational cost reduces, for process optimization is indirectly proportional to its associated cost.

Other factors that contribute in reducing operational cost are efficient handling of resources involved in a process and proficient monitoring of process activity. Both can be achieved through jSonic Workflow Management.

To conclude, it can be said that jSonic BPM enables stakeholders not only to reduce the operational cost but also increase transparency at each stage of process activity, and better utilization of process resources. jSonic provides better business everyday.

With ever-increasing pressure of competition coupled by the recent global economic slump, Outsourcing and Automating of Business Processes has become a kind of necessity for enterprise owners. Although Outsourcing of business process results in cost saving, quality of process outcome remains questionable many a time. The Quality of Business Process outcome is directly related to how the process is being understood, optimized, and executed by its stakeholders. This is exactly where the usability of Business Process Management (BPM) comes in and can help both – Organizations and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) – units.

In our earlier blog, ‘BPM as a Business Enabler’, we have already discussed about People, Process, System and Technology framework for BPM. Here we shall elucidate on how BPM and BPO can work in unison.

Effective communication and collaboration among BPO process owners and their counterparts is the initial step in understanding how the process work. BPM can accomplish this task efficiently through its Process Modeler functionality. Krawler jSonic BPM offers a unique Process Modeler, which is a web-based process designing and modeling tool that uses standard Business Process Modeling Notifications (BPMN). Furthermore, it eliminates the need of technical coding enabling the stakeholders to easily understand the process working mechanism.

Through BPM, an organization that wants to outsource their business process can be benefited in innumerable ways. BPM enables process owners to define (diagrammatically) and optimize the business process operating in the organization. Once that is done, they are assured about quality in process outcome. The outsourcing of such modeled process can yield in cost saving. Furthermore, with BPM in place, changes in the process can easily be accomplished through Business Rules Engine. In addition, when the contract with BPO agency expires, the process can again be easily implemented in organization’s BPM environment or can be re-outsourced.

From the perspective of BPO industry, BPM reduces the time period to understand the client’s process. It further enables stakeholders in BPO to clearly analyze an individual task in the concerned process, and formulate their strategy (in accordance with industry best practices) to achieve the process objective. This results in saving of time, resource, and cost while carrying out the process.

To conclude, BPM enables BPO owners to demonstrate that they have clear understanding of client’s process and client can be assured of both  ‘cost saving and quality’ related to the process outsourced.

A Workflow Engine is a critical component of Business Process Management that manages and executes business processes. In simple terms, Workflow Engine facilitates transition of modeled process from design phase to execution phase.

Workflow Engine aims to minimize manual intervention in the process, thereby reducing probability of human error. Many a time, initiation of a particular activity in the process depends on the completion of other. Actors involved in handling such activities should have instant information about the status of others. This in turn facilitates rapid execution of process, which may otherwise prolong its completion time. Thus, Workflow Engine reduces the overall process time to the minimum possible extent.

Enterprises follow certain guidelines – statutory or framed – while performing operational processes. These guidelines are incorporated in Business Rules Engine, and implemented through workflow engine. Workflow Engine performs wide range of activities such as submitting process related documents, sending email notifications to stakeholders, talking to web services, and more. Furthermore, Workflow Engine coordinates in carrying out various process tasks in the sequential order as defined in the process logic, known as Process Orchestration.

jSonic BPM supports the Web Service-Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) for carrying out the process orchestration through its workflow engine.

In the Krawler jSonic BPM context, workflow engine coordinates among the Business Rules Engine, Task Manager, and Activity Monitoring for efficiently carrying the workflow automation of modeled processes. Business Rules Engine enables Business Owners to create, edit and delete governing rules for business processes. Through Task Manager, process owners can monitor, review, and update their workflow tasks. Activity Monitoring facilitates real time monitoring of the processes, events, and triggers.

In a nutshell, it can be said that Workflow Engine acts as the brain of Business Process Management.

The prospects of Business Process Management (BPM) have generated huge excitement among Enterprise Owners and IT Owners, alike. This is mainly due to the fact that BPM efficiently handles the most core component of Business – Process.

The most frequent and basic question asked by the stakeholders – What is the first step in BPM implementation? The answer is quite simple – Process Modeling.

Process Modeling refers to the set of activity for documenting the Business Process using a combination of graphical notations and text. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the most widely accepted and used language for Process Modeling. Krawler jSonic Process Modeler is a powerful web based process designing and modeling tool, which uses standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).

Process Modeling enables process owners to analyze the current state of Business Process and perform the gap analysis for optimizing and improving the same. While carrying out the Process Modeling activity, participants can:
•    Learn the importance of each task in the process
•    Understand their role and responsibility in carrying out the process
•    Identify task that are comparatively more time consuming i.e. Bottleneck Identification

Once the process is modeled – roles, forms, and business rules – are assigned to individual tasks in the process.

In conclusion, Process Modeling provides the basic foundation on which further BPM activities – workflow automation, reporting, and more – are carried out.

BPEL is used for integrating and assembling various modular service components in order to execute the business process.

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language. It is also known as WSBPEL – Web Services Business Process Execution Language and is maintained by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

BPEL is an XML based language that enables task sharing in a distributed computing or grid computing environment through the use of web services. BPEL is basically an amalgamation of XLANG Language (Based on block structure) and WSFL Language (Based on directed graphs).

In the jSonic BPM environment, BPEL employs web services for enabling the import and export of process information as well as execution of business process.

The main aim of BPEL is to invoke various web services in the manner as defined by the process logic. This invocation can be either sequential or parallel. BPEL constructs consist of activities (basic and structured), variables, partner links and handlers (fault and exception) to carry out its function.

BPEL basic activities include “invoke”, “reply”, “receive”, “assign”, “throw”, “wait”, “terminate” and so on. The structured activities combine these basic activities with a condition. The structure actions include “switch”, “sequence”, “flow”, “while” and so on.

The ‘Partner Link’ represents the link to a web service that is being invoked or the link used by web services to invoke a BPEL activity.

‘Handlers’ in BPEL environment are used for facing an error or exception condition.

‘Variables’ are used to map and store data in the business process. There are three types of variables – Simple, Message and Element.

BPEL supports two basic types of business processes:

•Executable Process – Contains comprehensive details about business processes and can be executed through an Orchestration Server.

•Abstract Process – Contains only the public message protocols exchanged between various parties and are not executable.

The Orchestration server provides a run time environment for executing the ‘executable process’ and can operate on any platform that supports web service development, such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .NET, among others.

BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation. It is maintained by Object Management Group (OMG), also known as Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). BPMN enables stakeholders to graphically represent business processes from process initiation stage to final stage.

The main goal of BPMN is to model the business process in a manner that is easily understood by developers, business analysts, process owners and business users. It combines the advantages of text based, event based and graphical notations based business modeling languages.

BPMN consists of four basic categories – Flow Objects (Events, Activities, Gateways), Artifacts (Data Object, Group), Connecting Objects (Sequence Flow, Message Flow, Association) and Swimlanes (Pool, Lanes). A brief explanation of these four categories is presented here:

The ever changing market conditions across the world have forced organizations to rethink the way they carry out business. Organizations are focusing on optimizing and managing operational cost, improving customer service delivery, adopting strategy (IT & Non-IT) for flexibility and much more.

For businesses to be successful, a comprehensive framework involving People, Process, System and Technology (popularly known as PPST framework) plays a critical role. Let us briefly visit these four components.

• People refers to management, employees, vendors and customers. The People component is the most critical and decisive factor that determines the state of business.

• Process refers to the way in which various business activities are carried out. A well defined process framework guarantees success, consistently.

• System refers to various enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM and PLM, among others. These enterprise applications are generally tightly integrated with their respective domains. For example, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is only attached with marketing, sales and customer service.

• Technology refers to platform (UNIX, Windows) and architecture (n-tier, client server) on which the enterprise applications are employed.  Integration and communication issues between various enterprise applications are encountered due to heterogeneous platform and architecture.

So the question arises now is – Do we have a software system that incorporates the PPST framework?

I firmly believe that Business Process Management provides capabilities for effectively and efficiently managing people, process, system and technology.

Krawler offers a unique Business Process Management solution – jSonic BPM. It offers functionalities such as Process Management, Workflow Automation, Collaboration, Reporting, Data Management and Web Services that incorporates people, process, system and technology aspects. Some of the major functional capabilities of jSonic BPM are:

• Design, model, execute, automate and optimize the cross-functional business processes.
• Manage Process users at each process activity
• Add value to the existing enterprise applications
• Integrate with heterogeneous platform and architecture through an SOA framework
• Provides Collaboration features such as Document Management
• Web Services based for communicating with any web enabled device

The next question that arises now – What are the key Business Process Management offerings?

The main BPM offering can be summarized as:

• Holistic View of Business
• Understanding about the most fundamental component of business operations – Business Process
• Leverages on existing enterprise applications
• Effective communication between stakeholders
• Flexibility and adaptability to face any dynamic business conditions

In a nutshell, Business Process Management offers a comprehensive solution for managing enterprise operations through management of business processes.  BPM provides a complete solution for cross functional business process management that involves people, system and technology aspects.

BPM, in the true sense, acts as a business enabler by empowering organizations to handle any business opportunity or threat effectively.