What is Business Process Management?

BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into
your organization. Discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business
processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs

Business Process Definition (BPD)

Business Process Definition in IBM Process Designer is used to model a process. A BPD
is a reusable model of a process, defining what is common to all runtime instances of that
process model. The basic functionality they offer is to capture a sequence of activities to
build a workflow of an actual business model.
BPD == > Process Model (which came from Business Model)

Service
There are various types of services you have in IBM Process Designer. In this sample you
will use the following types of services:
0 Human Service: This type of service you create when you want a step in your
BPD to create an interactive task that process participants can perform in a Web-
based user interface. When you build Human services, you include coaches,
which are the web-based forms that provide process-related data to end users as
well as collect input from those users. Coaches enable you to easily add standard
fields and controls such as radio buttons, drop-down menus, and so on.
1 General System Service : Use General System services when you want to
orchestrate other background services, manipulate variable data, generate HTML
for a Coach, or perform some other actions that do not require any integrations or
business rules.
2 Integration Service: Use an Integration service when you want to integrate with an
external system. An Integration service is the only type of service that can contain
a Java or Web Service integration. You can call an Integration service from any
other type of service and an Integration service can call other nested services.

Business Object
Business Objects or the Data Objects are the data carriers basically used to exchange data
between the components of the BPD process.
IBM BPM comes with some built-in monitoring capability wherein it writes the values
for elements that have been selected for tracking to the Performance Data Warehouse
(PDW). The Performance Data Warehouse only receives data from the Business Process
Definition (BPD) and allows for monitoring business process instance execution, worker
and team performance, as well as process variables.
The big advantage of monitoring a BPD is that you do not have to do much get some
instant monitoring to understand the execution of your business process instances in more
detail.

Exposed Process Variables (EPVs)

Environment Variables

Introduction for Business Rules (BPM + BRM)

Introduction
- For this sample you need to have IBM Business Process Manager v7.5 -
In Business Process Management, when we want to automate business processes, we are
seeking for service implementations for identified business activities. Among all the
various steps identified during business process modeling, some tasks may be
implemented by business rules. Those tasks in IBM Business Process Manager are called
Decision tasks, and their implementations are called decision services.
These decision tasks are conform with the task type decision node identified in the
BPMN 20 standard. The combination of Business Process Management and Business
Rules Management is very powerful: Business rules are expected to be changed more
often than the process rules defined at the gateways used in the business process models.
It is therefore smarter to externalize the business rules to be able to change them without
having to change the business process itself.

IBM Business Process Manager includes decision tasks allowing for designing business
rules based in the data available to the business processes. The result of the business rules
can then be further used at process gateways for process navigation.

This sample explains to some level of detail how to make use of decision services using
so-called BAL (Business Action Language) rules when designing business processes. The
BAL Rule component provides a rule editor that allows rule designers to author business
rules using natural language technology. Using natural language, instead of JavaScript, to
author rules means that no programming expertise is required to create business rules,
and the rules are easier for people to read and understand.
This is very powerful, especially because in BPM we want process authors not to specify
business conditions at gateways but to use business rules for decision making. In IBM
Business Process Manager, business rules are included when using decision tasks. The
BAL rules used here are very well known from IBM WebSphere ILOG jRules, which is
IBMs Business Rules Management offering.

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Build a Decision service when you want a decision or condition in a business rule to
determine which process implementation is invoked. For example, when a certain
condition evaluates to true, IBM Process Designer is navigating to a specific task, after
the decision was further evaluated at a gateway.
IBM Process Designer supports business rule authoring tasks as performed by business
analysts and business users who are rule designers rather than programmers. Business
rule designers can express business logic using rule syntax that resembles natural human
language. This rule syntax is called Business Action Language (BAL), which is a
declarative language that relates business concepts to business data and actions.
Business rules are an expression of business policy in a form that is understandable to
business users and that can be executed by a rule engine. Business rules formalize a
business policy into a series of if-then statements. In Process Designer, business rules
are included in a business process definition (BPD) by adding a Decision service to the
process. Add a Decision service to a Process Application when the actions that should
take place in your process depend upon one or more conditions. For example, if a very
expensive laptop is ordered, management approval is required to proceed with the order.
To support this scenario, you can create a rule and set a variable in the rule, such as
approvalRequired, to route the process sequence flow into a specific approval activity.
A Decision service can contains one or more components. There are three types of
components:
3 BAL Rule - You can use the rule editor in this component to author business rules
using Business Action Language (BAL), a natural language technology.
4 JRules Decision Service - IBM Business Process Manager integrates with IBM
WebSphere ILOG JRules using the JRules Decision Service component. You can
use this rule component to connect to and implement rule applications that are
available on a JRules Rule Execution Server.
5 Decision Table - The Decision Table component contains a rule table. Each row
in the rule table represents a Boolean condition that evaluates to true or false at
run time. When a rule evaluates to true, the JavaScript expression that you provide
as the rule action is executed.

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 First there is Technical Business Analyst named Tania using IBM Process Designer
(formerly known as IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition Authoring Environment
(WLE AE)), and
Second an Integration Developer named Igor, using IBM Integration Designer
(formerly known as IBM WebSphere Integration Developer (WID))
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IBM Process Designers Inspector perspective is the perspective where to execute

business process definitions in kind of a prototype mode on playback server. Have a look
at your process in the Inspector perspective:

Lets quickly look what the Inspector perspective offers:

___a. 1: The upper left window shows all running process instances you are executing at
the moment.
___b. 2: This diagram windows shows the business process definition currently in
execution. Over time, it will be further enhanced with icons etc, to indicate what task is
executed at the moment, or other relevant information to understand the execution
progress of your process
___c. 3: This window shows the list of tasks that were already executed, or indicates what
next task is made ready for execution
___d. 4: In the execution state window you can follow the execution tree, and you can
specify breakpoints to debug the process
___e. 5: Here you can look into the process variables and follow how the process date is
set throughout process execution