Business Process and

Workflow Management

A SeeBeyond White Paper

March 2002

-1- ©2002 SeeBeyond, All Rights Reserved

Introduction
Business Process Management is often confused with Workflow as these technologies appear
to overlap in appearance and functionality and they have similar goals. Although these two
terms are similar and are often used by some people synonymously, these enabling
technologies evolved along different paths and are significantly different in their capabilities.

Workflow
Workflow is defined as the automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which
documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action,
according to a set of procedural rules.

Workflow engines have typically evolved to support the human interaction around document
review and approval (e.g. Drug Submissions) or case handling (e.g. Insurance Claims
Processing) where users process tasks placed in their inboxes.

Since workflow engines were built to mainly support regulated workflow processing, ad-hoc
document routing and content management, they typically have limited application integration
capability.

Business Process Management

Business Process Management is a general term describing a set of services and tools that
provide for process management (e.g., process modeling, execution, monitoring and
administration and analysis), increasingly providing support for application-level and human
interaction from a single solution.

Business Process Management is not to be confused with Business Process Modeling solutions.
Standalone Business Process Modeling solutions are targeted at business analysts who analyze
and optimize business process flows using a graphical process-modeling environment. The
results of such an analytical project phase are documented business process models. Business
Process Management then is about implementing these models closely tied to the business
practices they represent, running them on a daily basis and accessing the business-level data for
monitoring, auditing and measuring
business performance.

At runtime, an execution engine

(underlying state machine) manages
the business process instances as they
flow through the process model
following the logic in the business
rules. Each activity in the business
process may call applications to
perform work (e.g., legacy, packaged,
external B2B, Web services, etc.) or
create tasks (such as reviews and
approvals) that humans complete.
Figure 0 - Dashboard based on real-time business process data
The runtime environment maintains

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the status (state) of each process instance.

As hundreds of thousands of instances of different business processes execute, they can be

monitored for exceptions and managed in real time to ensure process integrity.

Once sufficient business process data is captured, a dashboard can provide real-time
performance indicators, and analysis can identify ways to improve the automated business
process going forward.

Similarities
The difference between Business Process Management and Workflow is sometimes confusing.
In both technologies, tasks or steps are defined and combined into long-lived processes,
involving decision points and merge, split and join operations for concurrent or parallel
processing.

Both BPM and Workflow describe processes at a business practice level rather than a technical
level, and UML Activity Modeling is often used in both as the graphical format for process
models.

Adding to the general confusion between BPM and Workflow tools is the fact that they are
increasingly converging in features and functionally.

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Converging Technologies
Business Process Management is very much a technology where different initiatives are
converging. As such, Workflow and eAI-based BPM should be seen as subsets of BPM.

Convergence between eAI-based BPM and

Workflow
As shown in the Gartner diagram below, Business Process Management that enables process
driven eBusiness Integration is the result of the recent convergence of Integration Tools and
Workflow Tools.

Figure 1 - BPM as a convergence between eAI-based BPM and Workflow (Gartner)

As eAI solutions became more complex and more widely adopted, flexible management and
tracking, visualization and reporting at a business level emerged as a key requirement for eAI
solutions, and eAI vendors are now using BPM to deliver these benefits. Workflow tools that
started out as as human workflow solutions realized that automating large parts of the designed
flows can offer major benefits to their customers, and workflow vendors started working to add
greater integration capabilities to deliver on the BPM vision.

Convergence between A2A and B2B

The next generation of business process management includes business processes that span
applications and corporate boundaries, as depicted in this slide from CSC.

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 Figure 2 - BPM as convergence between A2A and B2B

Integration initiatives within organizations (A2A) such as ERP, Internal Supply Chain
Management (SCM) and Workflow projects become more external oriented in initiatives such
as Customer Relationship Management and eAI. On the other hand, typical inter-organization
initiatives such as EDI and e-commerce, get tied closer into the business processes and
systems, with initiatives such as eBusiness and collaborative commerce.

Again, Business Process Management is where the inside-out and outside-in evolutions meet.

Importance of BPM
eBusiness requirements place huge burdens on internal and external business processes.
eBusiness means increased numbers of trading partners, resulting in increased transaction
speed, complexity and volume, and increased frequency of process change. Indeed, CFOs are
being asked to be process architects in the new economy because of the tremendous impact of
eBusiness on business processes.

Thus, BPM is one of the hottest new topics for application integration, and in many cases for
application design in general. The emerging set of BPM tools is critical for all business
activities and has collapsed product boundaries. As BPM grows rich in integration capabilities
and human support capabilities, it is critical to supporting the enterprise nervous system, with
its demands for business-to-business and application-to-application process integration.

As BPM continues to incorporate rich business process monitoring, this new real-time
enterprise status reporting will take BPM out of the back-office and put it on the desk of the
“CxO” (e.g., CEO, CIO, CFO or CTO) as a “Corporate Dashboard”. BPM offers what the
enterprise nervous system needs: rich coordination, a strong memory of processes and a
process-focused view of business. Enterprises that continue to hard code all flow control or
insist on manual process steps and do not incorporate BPM’s benefits will lose out on the
agility and flexibility that is beginning to characterize 21st century eBusiness infrastructure.

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Supporting technology
While the Integration and Workflow software offerings are relatively mature (more than ten
years of development), Business Process Management is a new technology aimed at fully
automating business processes to increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Rather than just automating the flow of work between people, part of this process involves
removing people from the process where the activity can be automated by systems.

Today, no mature Business Process Management tool exists that supports integrated process
automation as well as ad-hoc human document routing, with a quality of service even close to
current offerings from respectively, leading eAI-based BPM technology vendors and leading
Workflow technology vendors. However, technology supporting automated processes and
human ad-hoc routing are inherently different.

The Business Process Management Initiative (www.BPMI.org) recently debuted

Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), a new meta-language to define
business processes that span applications and corporate boundaries through
firewalls and over the Internet. BPML has several unique and increasingly
necessary components:
• Participant abstraction, recognizing that participants in a business process
will not only be people but will also include data, applications, trading
partners, exchanges, and the like.
• Recognition that process participants must include enterprise software
application processes, allowing business processes that span multiple
enterprise applications and company boundaries to be managed from a
single management console.
• Reliability standards for an all-or-nothing process guarantee on short- and
long-lived processes that span various protocols and organizational
boundaries.
Most existing workflow technologies do not support these new specifications.

Eric Austvold -- AMR Research Alert -- April 25, 2001

Leading eAI-based BPM technology, such as from SeeBeyond’s e*Insight Business Process
Manager will typically focus on

• Rapid integration across complex backend systems, including applications and

databases, and business partners such as trading partners and exchanges

• Transactional Monitoring for all-or-nothing guarantee and consistent long-lived

processes

• Integrated management, Integrity, Performance, Scalability and Reliability

• Event-driven Environment

• Pre-defined Human Interactions

• Data Mapping and Transformation

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 • On-line auditing of business transactions

• Process Data Warehousing with reporting and analysis options

Leading Workflow technology, such as Staffware or Documentum, will focus on

• Pre-defined and Ad Hoc Task Routing among Users

• Online forms for the web, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange

• Document and task DelegationBuilders for Custom User Interfaces

• Content management

• Document driven environment

However, all leading eAI-based BPM vendors and Workflow vendors are currently growing to
some degree into each other’s historical space.

eAI-based BPM
Even if no technology exists that really
combines all capabilities of robust eAI
and full-blown human workflow
technology, for many projects a choice
between eAI-based BPM or Workflow
with limited integration features can be
made based on the criteria predominant
for the project at hand.

Since Business Processes typically

reach across the organization and
beyond, supporting technology first of
all has to be able to integrate all
departments and systems of the
complete organization. eAI-based BPM
solutions typically represent the highest
chance to satisfy your BPM needs with Figure 3 - eAI-based BPM in action
only one toolset.

SeeBeyond, with its e*Insight and e*Gate offering, is particularly well placed to combine
robust integration technology and a set of workflow capabilities into a highly scalable Business
Process Management solution for process modeling, implementation, monitoring, management
and optimization. Unique and necessary components include participants (people, data,
applications, trading exchanges and web services) and reliability standards for all-or-nothing
process guarantees on short and long-lived processes spanning various protocols and
organizational boundaries.

Although both eAI-based BPM tools and Workflow tools can be used together, it’s preferable
to only need one of them. We’ll see that there are very compelling reasons to choose eAI-
based BPM technology, and that SeeBeyond’s eAI-based BPM technology might well cover
your workflow needs as well.

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Reasons to choose eAI-based BPM
If any of the following criteria is especially critical for your organization’s future, you should
choose the process driven integration approach delivered by SeeBeyond technology.

• Multi-Application Integration - If your business process encompasses several tasks

or activities that have to be performed in different systems, such as ERP, database,
legacy, CRM, portal or any other non-BPM or workflow system, you will be able to
seamlessly implement your BPM with your systems integrations using e*Insight.

• Intra & Inter-Enterprise Process Flow - If your business processes combine tasks
performed outside your organization (such as automated acceptance of an order or
portal query) and tasks performed inside your organization (such as validation against
your legacy or updates of your ERP), e*Xchange Partner Manager and e*Xpressway
OnRamp will work seamlessly with e*Insight to tie your A2A and your B2B
operations together.

• Robust Process Integrity Across Activities - If your Business Processes are not only
composed of loosely coupled tasks, but instead are composed out of groups of all-or-
nothing activities, e*Gate - the integration platform for e*Insight - can tie different
activities together into a single and consistent transaction, even across system
boundaries.

• Process Visualization & Documentation - During the development of your

automated business processes it’s important to be able to visualize the process
graphically, including decision points and parallel processing options. Also, you’ll
need to document them to the level of business attributes. e*Insight is the appropriate
BPM tool for you, since you’ll be able to detail the specifications of each activity
further down, until you’ve reached the implementation level where you’ll just specify
which ERP or CRM system to use for the activity. No additional development is
needed to tie the BPM layer and integration layer together.

• Process Level or System Level Agility - If it’s important to be able very quickly
change the way you do business (i.e. change your business process) to be able to stay
ahead of the pace of your market, without having to redevelop integrations between
systems, the integration between e*Insight and e*Gate will help you keep that
competitive edge.

• Real-Time Process Visibility and Human Intervention - For auditing and customer
service, it’s important to be able to visualize the status of each business transaction as
it flows across the extended organization using the same BPM paradigm you used for
the upfront analysis and design of the process. Using e*Insight’s real-time monitoring
capabilities, business flow is constantly monitored. This enables automated alerting
of end users in case of business events that require someone’s attention, taking into
account the context of a business process. In those cases, responsible managers can
influence the future flow of the business transaction at hand, through the BPM tool
itself, through a web inbox, or a Lotus Notes, Outlook or any other inbox.

• Process Data Consolidation - If it’s important to get a centralized business view of

your transactions on top of a system-level view of the data, you’ll benefit from
e*Insight’s automated storage of both business and runtime data values in a process
data warehouse. That way, system-level data is related to key performance indicators
for your business.

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 • Historical Process Analysis &
Optimization - It is not only
critical to monitor long-lived
business transactions as they
flow through your systems. For
optimization, forecasting and
reporting purposes, it’s also
required to be able to investigate
and analyze historical data.
Therefore, all process data is
stored in a process warehouse,
and reporting and analysis
wizards are provided. On top of
this, the Business Intelligence
toolset of your choice can be
used to further query the Process
Warehouse. Figure 4 - Historical Process Analysis in e*Insight

Workflow-related features in SeeBeyond’s

eAI-based BPM
If for the above reasons you choose to opt for eAI-based BPM, you will find that SeeBeyond’s
e*Insight covers most of your workflow needs as well.

Authorization and User Activities

The most important
workflow-related feature of
e*Insight is the ability to
incorporate Authorization and
User activities into otherwise
fully automated business
processes.

While the premise of

eBusiness Integration has been
to eliminate unnecessary and
error prone human interaction
with data and business
processing, there are obviously
logical points within any
business process where
humans either initiate the Figure 5 - User Inbox for a User activity in e*Insight
process or need to
approve/review decision steps.
Consequently, as SeeBeyond continues to expand the product, we are increasingly providing
robust means for end-user interaction.

Centrally, from the BPM tool, you can indicate at either design or run time who will have the
responsibility to perform which activity. Also, you’ll be able to secure which information will
be at the disposition of the decision-maker, and which decisions he will have to make.

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For example, when a partner-organization sends us an order, the BPM would be able to detect
that the order-amount is higher than the regular order limits. The BPM engine would decide
that a specific person (John Doe from the Sales Dept.) would have to take the decision whether
or not to approve the order. At that time, he would also need to be able to provide an
appropriate discount amount for the large order. In order to process the decision, John would
receive data relating to the order (amount, description, delivery date), the availability of the
goods (from our warehouse application) and the creditworthiness (from our ERP system) of the
customer.

Other workflow-related features in SeeBeyond’s eAI-based BPM

Here’s a short overview of what workflow-related features can be found in e*Insight on top of
the integration requirements workflow projects often have.

• The ability to graphically design business processes using UML Activity

Diagrams

• The ability to design business processes with conditional routing and aborts,
and functions based on complex business rules, without programming. Also
the ability to set time-outs on tasks and serial and parallel tasks.

• Provides Rollback functionality for long-lived transactions across systems, to

ensure that all activities compete successfully or the process is fully backed
out

• The ability for humans to alter the flow of a particular process (business
transaction) after it has started to be processed

• The ability to create processes with structured document message data and
process them as a single entity

• The ability to monitor and manage the status of the workflow

• The ability to send out alerts and notifications to employees using phone,
email, intranets, pagers, faxes and the likes.

• The ability for intranet or groupware systems to integrate the workflow’s

human decision process

• Allow for process model decomposition and nesting to several levels, also
dynamically and remotely.

• Provides for dynamic or ad-hoc routing, based on any business attribute or

algorithm

• Provides for ad-hoc reports, for scheduled (monthly, weekly) or user defined
reports

• The ability to access statistical information from live and archived data

• Tracking and audit logs are protected from unauthorized change

- 10 - ©2002 SeeBeyond, All Rights Reserved

Combining eAI-based
BPM and Workflow tools
If eAI-based BPM is an incomplete solution for the needs of a workflow project, one might
consider combining an eAI-based BPM tool and a workflow tool. According to the project,
several scenarios are possible. The BPM-driven scenario is the most probable.

Combination Scenario’s
All leading Workflow and eAI-based BPM-tools provide hierarchical business process models.
This means that each individual activity can again be exploded into a full business process.
An activity in an eAI-based BPM tool can be implemented as a workflow process, or vice
versa. Depending on which model will take the initiative, several models can be considered.

eAI-based BPM driven

In this scenario, the initiative is always taken by an
automated system, based on manual input –from, for
example, a portal or ERP system, or based on a
business event, for example, an order coming in or an
action taken in a groupware package. A workflow
process typically is needed only for some sets of
activities.

For example, 99.5% of all security trades for a

clearinghouse are performed automatically. In certain
circumstances, such as if fraud is suspected, a human
decision will have to be made. This decision can be
made inside e*Insight using an Authorization activity,
or external to e*Insight using User activities
represented by a simple workgroup or intranet screen. If
such a decision requires paperwork, delegation and lots of Figure 6 – eAI-based BPM-driven scenario
ad-hoc user routing, a workflow process will be needed.

The business process model will be performed for a specific instance (trade). In case of
possible fraud, the business process model will halt at a user activity and invoke the workflow
system.

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 Figure 7 - Business Process Model awaiting a decision from a Workflow system

The business-process designers will decide

• which user, function, role or group of users will be able to make the decision,

• which information is handed over to the workflow system, for example the
name of the client, the symbol of the security-trade and the amount of
options to trade

• which answers are expected back, for example the final decision and a
discount percentage

Once the workflow system has finished collecting a decision, the decision and the data
feedback are handed back to the BPM system. The BPM system will continue the automated
process, taking into account the decision that has been made.

Figure 8 - Passing responsibility and data back and forth between BPM and Workflow

As the workflow system is performing the decision process, at all times it can investigate the
data from the BPM system using secure API’s. Special API’s exist for activities such as to

• create a list of decisions to be made

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 • authenticate the access rights of the workflow system or the user of such a
system

• get details on the business data and responsibility attached to the decision
(user activity)

• feed the decision back to the BPM process

e*Insight’s native API is a Java-API, but interaction with the workflow system is also possible
using email, SNMP, HTTP, EJB, .Net, or any other protocol supported by the e*Gate
integration layer.

Here’s an example of how to get a list of decisions to be made. For this example we chose to
use JSP:

Figure 9 - JSP example of how to get a list of decisions to be taken

And an example of how to feedback a decision from a workflow system to the BPM system
(again we chose to use JSP):

Figure 10 - JSP example of how to feed back a decision into the BPM system

Workflow driven
In this scenario, the initiative is always taken by an existing or new workflow system, probably
after a lengthy process of document negotiation and content management. Some activities
however will require high performance, massive, and yet manageable processing. However
rare, examples of this approach exist.

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For example, an individual with very complex needs wants to
take a combination of insurance policies for his life, family,
house, several cars, and will also take a mortgage and a separate
savings account for him and his family. For all these products,
he’ll need a combined quote. First, a lot of documents will have
to be negotiated and be approved. This is a typical workflow
activity. Once all necessary signatures have arrived, including
the customer’s, the specifications will have to be split up for
different systems, validated against them, the combined quote
will have to be split up for the different insurance and banking
systems, and a combined communication chain will have to be
set up. This is a typical eAI-based BPM task.

Whenever the workflow system decided to hand over the

processing to the eAI-based BPM-system, it’ll initiate a business
process instance to flow through the BPM system. With
SeeBeyond technology, this can be sending the required data to Figure 10 - Workflow-driven
e*Insight, by using an EJB, .Net, HTTP, TCP/IP or any other scenario
supported interface, even just by writing the relevant data to a
file.

Using e*Gate as the integration layer, the format of the data used to instantiate a new business
process can be designed freely. All types of formats can be used, including XML, fixed or
delimiter separated formats.

Here’s an example of how a new business process is instantiated using a comma-separated

message in .Net technology (ASP).

Figure 11 - Instantiating a new business process using .Net

Peer-to-peer
In this scenario, eAI-based BPM and Workflow complete each
other’s responsibilities, but don’t rely on each others decisions.
They merely form separated, self-contained flows that use each
other’s results.

In this approach, both systems are loosely coupled and just hand
over responsibility and data. This scenario is never used in highly
regulated environments or for transactional systems.

Figure 12 - Peer to peer scenario

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Conclusion
Because of similarities in goal and techniques, Business Process Management is often confused
with Workflow. Business Process Management should be considered as the result of a
convergence between eAI and Workflow, and as a convergence between A2A and B2B.

Today, no technology exists that reliably supports all functions of eAI and Workflow.
However, both eAI-based BPM technology and Workflow technology are converging into each
other’s space at a fast rate.

Mature eAI-based BPM technology supports mainly automated business processes with pre-
defined user activities. Mature Workflow technology supports ad-hoc document routing, with
minimal use of automated activities.

Since by definition business processes span the extended enterprise, eAI-based BPM
technology such as e*Insight from SeeBeyond offers the best chance to cover all your BPM
needs. If for complex projects, a combination would be required between eAI-based BPM
technology and Workflow technology, different strategies exist, depending on which system
would really drive the process. Because e*Insight offers a wide variety of integration options
coupled with workflow technology, it will be able not only to cover your current but also your
future business process needs.

- 15 - ©2002 SeeBeyond, All Rights Reserved