For businesses to become and remain successful as well as competitive, they must continuously improve their processes. This can be done easily with the help of a BPM tool. Now questions may arise in your mind like what is BPM? How is it useful for one’s company? What are its features and benefits? You can get the answers to these questions in this article below. Let’s get started.
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Oracle BPM – Table of Contents
What is Oracle BPM?
Oracle BPM stands for business process management. It is a part of the Oracle Business Process Management Suite. Oracle Business Process Management is a set of various tools and functions for creating business processes and executing and optimizing them. It enables unique collaboration between the IT department and the businesses to automate and enhance the business processes. As a result, it increases the performance, agility, and efficiency of the organizations along with lowering their costs. Moreover, this software greatly supports your existing IT investments and thus is specially made for business line users. Using this application will not only improve the productivity and visibility of one’s organization, but it will also provide agility to deliver results like never before.
Why Oracle BPM?
Businesses are in a need of improving their processes continuously nowadays to rise above their competition and rivals. They must be prepared for every challenge that comes in their way. Oracle’s business process management system can help them by easing their workloads, efficiently managing them, and providing a source for collaboration among all the employees. Additionally, it provides quality satisfaction to whoever is using the system. Not only this, but Oracle BPM also runs operations smoothly resulting in lower costs, higher revenues, more motivated employees, and satisfied customers. These are more than enough reasons for why one should choose Oracle BPM above all the other solutions available in the market.
Why you should use Oracle BPM?
There are a lot of business processes designed in an organization to meet the goals and objectives. However, there are some processes that due to some reasons are slow, redundant, and unreliable. Oracle BPM improves such processes and increases the overall performance. Not only this, there are more reasons why businesses should choose Oracle BPM. They are as follows:
- It gives the process analysts and owners the freedom to customize the business rules and processes.
- The system delivers a web-based application so that the users can create processes, edit rules, and customize the tasks using predefined components.
- Oracle BPM process spaces provide collaboration opportunities that drive innovation and productivity.
- Flexible and unstructured processes can be included by expanding business process management. Besides, this application adds support approval routing as well as dynamic tasks using declarative patterns.
- The users are enabled to create standardized process models with a user-friendly application. Moreover, it supports BPEL and BPMN 2.0 and lets process developers and analysts collaborate.
- During all the stages of the application lifecycle, the users can participate as the application unifies design, runtime, implementation, and monitoring stages.
Oracle BPM Features
There are a lot of similar products that are available in the market. A company would always want to choose the best business process management system for it so that it could manage all the processes efficiently and increases performance. Oracle BPM has a lot of features that make it stand out and become the number one choice of organizations. The features are:
- Studio Features:
- User-friendly BPMN modeling
- Multilanguage modeling and documentation
- Flexible integration via introspection
- Organization, roles, calendar, and holiday rules
- Workflow, rules, and forms editor
- Multilanguage modeling and documentation
- Multi-process simulation
- Testing and debugging environment
- User Interaction Features:
- Custom views
- Simple Syndication notification
- Web-based user interface for end-users
- Customizable JSF
- Built-in collaboration features
- Roles-based access
- Microsoft Office integration
- Dashboard Features:
- Process activity tracking
- Detail drill-down
- Near-real-time reporting
- Configurable by end-user
- KPI monitoring
- Prebuilt dashboards
- Graphical charts and tables
- Server Features:
- High-performance and scalable server
- Multiple platform support
- Web-based administration console
- XPDL support
- A dynamic binding to services
- Multi-version process instances
- Other Features:
- Oracle Process Composer
- Adaptive Case management
- Integrated content management
- Unified WYSIWYE model
- Predefined process models and business rules
- Process simulation and analysis
- Packaged application adapters
- Business catalog
Learn Oracle BPM to Unleash a Modern Career
Oracle BPM Architecture
Oracle BPM has a quite complex architecture. It has a lot of components that interact with each other for the application development process. The various components are as follows:
- Process Modeling and Implementation:
- Oracle BPM Studio – It is a part of Oracle BPM where the process analysts can design and deploy the business process models and can run process simulations too with the help of a user-friendly environment.
- Business Process Composer – It enables users to collaborate with designers and developers. Also, it lets them edit processes and templates.
- Metadata Service Repository – This is a repository in the system where all the information about the deployed applications is stored.
- Projects – They are the containers for the processes and their related resources that are used to create process-based business applications.
- Runtime Components:
- Oracle BPM Engine – BPM engine is responsible for providing a runtime environment for running the business processes.
- Human Workflow – Human Workflow provides features such as task routing, deadlines, escalation and notifications feature, task forms for task presentation, and other features such as filtering, dispatching, organization, prioritization, etc.
- Oracle Business Rules – This component permits dynamic decisions at runtime that allows the applications to adapt to pressure.
- Oracle Web Logic Server – It is a platform for creating and running J2EE compliant applications.
- Enterprise Manager – Enterprise Manager allows system administrators to manage and control applications.
- Suite Process Participant Applications:
- Process Management Workspace – Process workspace allows the users to get in touch with the applications created. It provides tabs like tasks, process tracking, standard dashboards, etc.
- Process Management Process Spaces – It increases collaboration. As a result, more productive process management is done.
- Other Components:
- Process Analytics – Users can monitor the performance of process-based applications that are running with the help of process analytics.
- Guided Business Processes – It enables the process developers and analysts to group the activities into milestones for easier understanding and completion of tasks.
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Oracle BPM Benefits
Processes drive businesses. Oracle BPM is one such comprehensive platform with a unified engine and single design time for forms, integration, tasks, rules, etc. It comes with the following benefits:
- It has specialized tools and functions that allow collaboration between IT and business.
- An executable process model is provided on which the whole organization can take reference.
- It makes sure that the executed process and the model process are the same.
- The application comes with a key performance indicator that identifies the opportunity for optimization.
- It supports human collaboration and improves the efficiency and quality of the processes. It does so by raising utilization and throughput.
- Real-time analytics are there that increases visibility. Also, transparent data is provided to simplify compliance. In short, it increases the agility with the help of flexibility tools.
- Last but not least, process composer is a web-based business tooling that empowers every business to design and drive business processes in a more efficient way.
Oracle BPM New Offerings
The newest and latest version of Oracle BPM is the Oracle BPM Suite 12.2.1. It is a complete and unified platform that allows the customers to improve the business strategy and execution and fulfill their automation needs. This version covers 4 key functionality domains:
- Business architecture
- Adaptive case management
- Intelligent operations
- Collaborative business modeling
Apart from them, REST APIs, Reusable user interface components, and Alta user experience have also been installed in the system. These BPM functions and operations are easily consumable by external solutions. Furthermore, Alta offers:
- Native mobile UI
- Fresh visual design components for modern layout approach
- Fully redesigned UI component interactions and sets
- UI conducive to responsive design techniques
Advantages and Disadvantages of Oracle BPM
Oracle BPM is largely used by many businesses across the world to automate their business processes. It makes their creation and execution easy. But, businessmen need to be aware of the pros and cons of this product before using it.
Advantages –
- To begin with, it provides a lot of shapes to drag and drop making the business process creation easy.
- Manages long-running processes efficiently and allows the user to create approval flows in many ways.
- A user-friendly interface is given where you can see your progress and all the tasks.
- With the help of adapters, it can easily integrate with third-party software and other products by Oracle.
- Handles the biggest and all kinds of business processes quickly and easily.
- It has a real-time analytics feature and it easily import flows from the Oracle database.
- Lastly, it comes with numerous features and great flexibility in completing every process.
Disadvantages –
- Firstly, the price of this software can be an issue for small businesses.
- User experience, usability, and ability to integrate a bit outdated as compared to other products.
- It requires a decent amount of IT knowledge to understand the usage of so many features.
- At last, internal documentation is poor. Also, debugging errors can prove to be a tedious task.