Who Needs Process Logic And Why

1
Who Needs Process Logic? And Why?

• Brett Adam
• Snr. Dir. Market Strategy

2
What We Do

• Versata simplifies and accelerates the way
• business logic for
• enterprise applications is
• Created
• Executed
• Reused
• and Changed
• enabling faster delivery of J2EE applications
  on
  
  time, within budget,
  using your existing development teams
• reducing the risk the expense of keeping pace
  with the rapid change of business.

3
What Transactions Need Process Logic?

• After a thorough analysis of numerous customer
  applications, we identified a need for better
  business process support
• Some applications worked well initially, but when
  business processes changed they broke down.
• Other applications had quite a bit of
  hand-written event code to track process state
  and transitions
• And management of time based activity was outside
  the scope of declarative business logic
• We started looking for a better way

4
Beyond Traditional Applications

• Some business logic is hard to express or hard
  to change with old school approaches
• Business transactions that involve multiple
  steps, especially over time, or across multiple
  systems or people
• Systems that interact with humans
• Assignment
• Notification
• Systems that must adapt on the fly
• Exceptions
• Escalation
• Systems that deliver more management
• With less developer effort

5
Are you Managing complex state transitions?

• If your application has
• Hard-coded transaction states, like a flag set to
  approved, pending, etc.
• Approval cycles
• Starts easy on approval required add a state
  attribute on an order and have a screen query by
  this attribute
• But what happens when this approval happens at 2
  levels or in parallel or one approval is
  conditional?
• Explosion of state variables and rules

6
Trying to drive cross-functional efficiency?

• What if you need to notify a sales manager when a
  large order is created?
• Create an Action Rule?
• What if the event is time-based?
• Send an email if work notcompleted within 24
  hours?
• Escalate to a manager if notcompleted in three
  days?
• Retry five times?
• How to audit measure what occurred?
• To prove contractual compliance
• To drive operational improvement

7
Trying to efficiently coordinate long
transactions?

• If your app needs a multi-step process or
  involves people of different roles in one
  business transaction
• Create lookup tables and rules for roles
• Design approval cycle and state-chart
• Create attributes in database to track state
• Create business rules to validate each
  state-change against the allowed roles
• Create screens that query basedon current
  state and rolesof logged in User
• Allow users to update state
• And then change all of this as roles and
  processes change.

8
Trying to deliver operational visibility?

• Visibility
• dashboard, whats going on
• Wheres this process at?
• Auditing
• What happened who did it
• Metrics
• Cycle times, business analysis
• Reporting against cross-functional execution
• Aggregate and specific historical analysis

9
And trying to adapt to constant change?

• Exceptions
• Todays exception is tomorrows new use case, and
  leads to next years new system
• Not fast enough!
• True Exception handling requires the flexibility
  to change rapidly
• In some cases, on the fly
• And the ability to observe whats going on
• To form the basis of new best practice process

10
If you have face those challenges

• The you have a Business Process Management
  problem!
• Business Process Management delivers key
  operational capabilities encompassing

Definition Enactment
Visibility Reliability Adaptability
Proactivity Metrics Auditability
Scalability
11
Business Process Defined

• Some Definitions
• Business Process Automation or Workflow the
  enactment and coordination of business processes,
  in whole, or in part, during which documents,
  information or tasks are passed from one
  participant to another for action, according to a
  set of procedural rules
• Business Process Model a sequence of Activities
  and Transitions
• Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)
• Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI)

12
What is Process Logic?

• Automation of Interactions
• Definition of the ordering of separate
  transactional activities that occur over time
• Most valuable when these activities are performed
  by more than one participant
• Defined graphically as a flow chart or activity
  diagram
• Benefits
• Ties process to critical e-business transactions
  that need to span systems, people and time
• Provides collaboration between business and IT
• Enables rapid change as requirements shift
• Delivers business metrics and execution control

13
Introducing, the Business Process

• We can express process logic most easily in terms
  of a business process model

14
We Knew This All Along!

• People usually start analyzing businesses in
  terms of processes first
• Business Process Reengineering
• Rational Unified Process (RUP UML)
• Use Cases ? Activity Diagrams
• Barbara von Halle S.T.E.P.
• Technology ? Process ? Rules ? Data
• If you can express your business logic in an
  unambiguous language, then it can be automated,
  no matter what language!

15
Process in the Enterprise Architecture

• What
• Application Databases
• Transactions
• Business Rules
• Business Logic

• Who
• Roles
• Authorities
• Workgroups
• Directory Services

Applications
People
Processes

• When
• Process Rules
• WorkLists
• MetricsAudit Trails
• Process Engines

16
Fitting Transactions Process Together

• Transaction Logic automates a business
  transaction at a point in time
• ex transfer funds from checking to savings
• Process Logic automates the sequence of
  transactions over time
• ex if funds over 1 million, get approval, then
  transfer funds
• Decision Logic automates flow control between
  transactions

Transaction
Activity A
Activity B
Event Action
?
Transaction Logic
Process Logic
Transaction
HumanActivity
Decision Support System
17
Typical J2EE Physical Architecture
Multiple Front Ends
Reusable Application Components
Integrating With Enterprise Applications Core
Business Systems
18
Various approaches to business process

• Implicit vs Explicit
• Contrast to stovepiped data centric apps
• Human vs Automated
• Contrast to EAI/B2Bi
• Documents vs Databases
• Contrast to Doc Mgmt
• Analysis vs Execution
• Contrast to Analysis/Modeling

19
How Process?

• Core concepts
• A shift in Application Architecture
• Activity based analysis (Activity Diagram)
• Process Models (specification)
• Process Logic Engine (execution)
• Activity Implementations (unit of work)
• Worklists (delivery)

20
A Shift from Monolithic Applications

• Domain-oriented (Client driven)
• Multiple transaction screens bundled in one
  application or one session for supporting all
  aspects of the domain (e.g. Order Management
  System)
• User chooses what to do and when
• Typified by constant browsing behavior
• System supports the process
• Process is defined and managed externally

21
To Task-oriented Applications

• Task Oriented (Process Driven)
• Task-Specific applications
• One objective each (e.g. Place Order, Approve
  Order, Update Customer)
• Work Delivery application
• Drives invocation of Task-Specific applications
• Process is explicit and drives the solution
• The String through the Pearls
• Can be layered on top of existing systems
• Eliminates browsing behavior
• Usage becomes push from the process definition
• Delivers many additional benefits for free
• Rich execution engine functionality

22
New Process Managed applications
Worklist Delivery Application
Process Presentation
 
 
 
Start
End
Process
Task-specific Presentation
Transactions
23
Activity

• Activities are representations of units of work.
  They may have the following properties
• Activity Type assignable, autonomous
• Transaction, email, monitor, web service, delay,
  
• Participant person, role, rule-based
• Martin, help desk, southeast area managers,
• Notification method
• Worklist, email, pager, phone, MDB, IM,
• Application invocation
• What application to invoke (and parameters) to
  provide for participant to complete activity

24
Transitions
Transitions model and control the flow between
activities
25
Transitions (1)

• Transition Conditions
• Overdue, Condition, Abort, Synchronous,
  True/False
• Decision Nodes (Branching)

26
Transitions (2)

• Synchronizer waits until all incoming
  transitions have fired
• Discriminator waits until first transition
  fires
• Terminal ends process when first transition
  fires

27
Multi-Step Work with the Process Logic Engine

• Visualization of approval process
• Automated synchronization of parallel cycles
• Mapping of Activities to differing Participants
• Users perform work seen on their worklists
• Easily support escalation and ad-hoc change
• No database changes!

28
Notification with the Process Logic Engine

• Visualization of notification process
• Automated deadlines escalation
• Manage the notification as an Activity
• Ability to cycle (retry) an arbitrary number of
  times.

29
Versata Logic Suite
------ Runtime ------
----- Development -----

• Versata Logic Studio with
• Transaction Logic Designer
• Process Logic Designer

• Versata Logic Server with
• Transaction Logic Engine
• Process Logic Engine Add-On

Logic Rules, Processes
Repository (XML)
30
Summary

• Operational efficiency demands better business
  process management
• Building process support into your schema and
  rules is too constraining and expensive
• Business Process Management technology makes the
  process explicit and declarative
• Maps to the way the business expresses
  requirements
• Changes the application architecture to be more
  granular (task oriented)
• Delivers real business benefits with less effort!

31
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