Read this white paper for an explanation of how business process management melds with complex event processing. The combination nets intelligent business processes that react to changing business conditions in real time, providing continuous visibility-in short, an instantly responsive enterprise.
The Instantly Responsive
Enterprise: Integrating Business
Process Management and
Complex Event Processing An Oracle White Paper Updated August 2008
The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating Business Process Management and Complex Event Processing
INTRODUCTION Over the last several years, business process management (BPM) has evolved from Put BPM and CEP together and you get a mysterious alchemy of arc-and-bubble graphics to a mainstream tool of the trade intelligent business processes that react to changing business conditions in real that integrates IT technologies for business advantage. In parallel, complex event time, providing continuous visibility-in processing (CEP) has expanded beyond being applicable only in the isolated short, an instantly responsive enterprise. domain of foreign exchange trading and is now improving a broad range of processes-from transportation logistics to customer relationship management. Put BPM and CEP together and you get intelligent business processes that react to changing business conditions in real time, providing continuous visibility-in short, an instantly responsive enterprise.
The goal of CEP is to discover information contained in the events detected throughout all layers of the organization, understand the information at the macro level as comprising a "complex event," determine its impact, and then act upon it in real time. BPM helps organizations ensure that business processes are optimally defined, managed, executed, and monitored.
BENEFITS An event-driven BPM solution offers the following benefits:
Real-Time Sense and Respond An event-driven BPM solution enables each step in a business process to be informed not only by the previous step, but also by any other step, data, and pattern of behavior deemed relevant to that step. This gives the business the ability to "sense and respond," which is the default operating mode for all businesses. Because CEP operates in the real-time domain, an event-driven BPM solution can respond and operate in real time.
Real-Time Visibility with Business Activity Monitoring An event-driven BPM solution generates and executes events and business processes in real time, thus it supports business activity monitoring (BAM), which gives users complete visibility of business processes in real time. According to an
The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating BPM and CEP Page 2 Oracle customer survey,1 such visibility is the second most common driver of return on investment.
Real-Time Process Monitoring and Control Companies can manage events to better monitor progress, track performance, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), manage exceptions, and issue alerts to automated operations or employees when a process is not functioning properly.
Figure 1: This figure illustrates the high-level architecture for integrating a CEP system, including Oracle WebLogic Real Time, as an upstream trigger for BAM and BPM systems.
BUSINESS SCENARIOS: INTEGRATING CEP AND BPM The following business scenarios highlight the synergy between CEP and BPM. These examples capture the interaction and integration points of these processes.
Scenario 1: Create a New Business Process There are myriad examples of CEP generating a composite business event that has There are myriad examples of CEP significant and immediate consequences for the business. One example that affects generating a composite business event that has significant and immediate many consumers is the loss of baggage during air travel. According to USA Today,2 consequences for the business. U.S. airlines lost 10,000 passenger bags per day in 2005. CEP technology enables airlines to draw on events from the event clouds of various disjointed operations to discover that a passenger bag is lost as soon as it 1 Oracle survey of more than 200 Oracle Business Process Management Suite customers worldwide-multiple responses possible (November 2007). 2 Marilyn Adams, "Airlines Lost 10,000 Bags a Day in '05," USAToday.com (February 6, 2006), http://www.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2006-02-16-lost-bags-usat_x.htm (accessed July 30, 2008).
The Instantly Responsive Enterprise: Integrating BPM and CEP Page 3 happens. As a result, they can update the BAM dashboard to show that the bag is lost. In parallel, ... [download for more]
