Business Process is a collection of related and structured activities resulting in a product or a service. These processes are critical to any organization as they are related to business objectives such as revenue. BPM is a method of integrating various activities using technology and then orchestrating various processes to achieve business goals. In essence BPM involves people, processes and technology to improve organizational efficiency. BPM life cycle includes design, execution, monitoring and optimization.
A good example would be a procurement process which involves receiving quotes/bids, vendor selection, purchase order, monitoring delivery of goods/services and account payable. In the above example, there could be various applications deployed in heterogeneous platforms and organizational boundaries to complete the entire work. Using BPM technology mentioned below, people and processes can be connected to form a coordinated business process orchestration resulting in improved business agility.
- Using Microsoft BizTalk server, business process owners can define business processes in a way that is easily understood by a technology team.
- Defined processes can then be developed into orchestrations using a Microsoft based .NET programming language such as C#. Orchestrations can make use of data-mapping tools to convert any required data and then can convert them to a format required by next orchestration.
- Orchestrations can consume data in a variety of ways such as e-mail, FTP, web service method call, database based trigger, etc. They can be combined in several ways with rules to form the required outcome. They can be utilized for transactions within and outside of organizational boundaries.
- BizTalk server’s Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) helps to monitor business processes and provides visibility into performance bottlenecks.
- Other Tools within BizTalk can provide decision makers views on Key Performance Indicators to help them make and enforce the right decisions.
