Business Process Standard Moves Forward

By Richard Karpinski

Do you conduct or manage your business, just take close look at some of the daily activities that you or your employees generally perform to run your business operations. If you try to observe or study your own business daily doings, you may find that most of the tasks that you perform are repetitive as well as tedious in nature and so a proper automation procedure is required that can effectively automate the entire process with zero involvement from you. Business process automation also known as BPA is thus defined as a process that focus on streamlining and automating key processes that help in driving the value for a organization. It consists of integrated applications and cuts down the labor cost wherever possible. Gaining its popularity, this process is also defined as technology components that have the ability to substitute manual process and further manage the flow of information to reduce cost and increase consistency.

Looking at the present scenario due to rigorous demand in the market, many enterprises are planning to deduce costs and in-turn increase shareholder value. As a result in order to survive in such competitive environment, businesses can have significant cost reductions and efficiencies by automating business process flows and eliminating non-value-adding human interventions. Business Process Automation software enables organizations to design, implement, observe, and constantly upgrade business processes that span organizational boundaries.

Talking about some of the major benefits of BPA, it makes business operation faster and easier. Apart from this it also automates the intricate processes mostly involved in running projects, programs and managing resources across the lifecycle. In fact it is the most inclusive workflow engine in the industry and offers the most elasticity for corporations in spite of organization size.

However, it is important to note that this process can deliver profit to any organization only with a combination of process re-engineering and technology along with organizational structure that can support both. In addition to this, BPA features three important pillars like: orchestration, integration, and dynamic process automation and combination of these three elements further enables organization to simplify and automate business processes despite of scale and intricacy of any business operation.

Orchestration facilitates business managers to work together on automated process designs using easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces. But orchestration must assemble and transform data/events into actionable information which further smooth the progress of proactive decision-making. Nevertheless orchestration is not useful in the absence of integration, so integration is must to change and replace critical data that affect the decision-making of humans and machines. Since most of the business processes consist of different systems, varied environments, and multiple applications, so an effective integration plays a vital part in business process automation.

The final element of business process automation is dynamic and automated execution across multiple systems. An effective automation finally enables organizations to eliminate repetitive and manual tasks. Automation integrates control over the development process to eliminate the hassles of managing and maintaining code over the long term.

A new XML standard for automating business process management was released as a final draft Wednesday, setting the stage for the addition of standards-based workflow capabilities to enterprise servers and applications.

Business Processing Modeling Language (BPML) 1.0 was released as a final draft by the Business Process Management Initiative. The group also released the first public draft of the Business Processing Modeling Notation (BPMN 0.9), which provides standards-based graphical interface that can be used to describe business processes.

BPML is not the only such would-be standard making the rounds. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) is being forwarded by IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and others. IBM is making BPEL4WS support a major feature in the upcoming release of WebSphere 5.0. The BPMI said BPML 1.0 is interoperable with BPEL4WS.

Both XML-based approaches to business process management provide enterprises with the ability to define business process workflows in a standard way and provide a standard way for other applications to access and be a part of the process flow.

BPML 1.0 leverages the Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) for the definition of public process interfaces, and is designed to support the emerging WS-Security, WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specifications for the execution of collaborative business processes.

The BPML 1.0 specification is available royalty free.