White PapersThis white paper shows how they actually complement each other and how the differing frameworks can enhance your business.
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All other names and marks are property of their respective owners.CWP1490E1206-1AUntitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementT able of ContentsExecutive summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1Understanding business process management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1What is business process management? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1BPM suites: What s in the box? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2Five key benefits of BPM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6What is Service-Oriented Architecture? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6Key technologies of SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6BPM and SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7Benefits of BPM on SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8BEA: Leading the way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10The costs of waiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10The bottom line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11What to do next? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12Join the BEA community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12About BEA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementExecutive summaryService-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) are two of the most talked-aboutbusiness initiatives, and for good reason. Both promise to help companies create new value from existing invest-ments, reuse efforts across many projects, and achieve new levels of agility through greater flexibility and lowercost structures. The two are often confused and described interchangeably, most likely because they confermany of the same benefits. But they are very different initiatives. SOA focuses on creating a more flexiblearchitecture, which can be applied across multiple dimensions, while BPM has a pure focus on optimizing theway actual work gets done.SOA has been widely discussed in the past several years. This paper s purpose is not to advance the definitionof SOA, or discuss SOA deeply, but rather to explain the relationship SOA has with BPM, including the impactBPM has on SOA and vice versa. This paper summarizes the basics of BPM and SOA, details their respectivefeatures and benefits, and explores the value added by putting them together.Understanding business process managementWhat is business process management?To many practitioners of BPM, it is first and foremost a management discipline, a way to think about the busi-ness in terms of the atomic and dynamic work being done to achieve goals the business has established foritself. Often the activities that comprise end-to-end processes cut across organizational and system boundaries(Figure 1), which is why BPM is at once both challenging and incredibly valuable.The ideas behind modern BPM are not new, though the term itself was only introduced in the early 2000s. BPMfollows initiatives established throughout the 1980s and 1990s such as Total Quality Management (TQM), BusinessProcess Reengineering (BPR), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). These methodologies all strove to improvethe performance of businesses through measurement, restructuring, automation, and other techniques.1Figure 1BPM represents a new way toanalyze and measure the businessin terms of business processesthat cut across traditional organi-zational and system boundaries.C u s t o m e rR e l a t i o n s h i pM a n a g e m e n tS a l e s a n dM a r k e t i n gP r o d u c t i o nP l a n n i n gM a n u f a c t u r i n gF i n a n c e & H RI n v e n t o r y &L o g i s t i c sP r o d u c t C o n f i g u r a t i o nO r d e r M a n a g e m e n tW a r r a n t y & R e t u r n s M a n a g e m e n tO r g a n i z a t i o n a l U n i t sC R ME R PS F AP r o d u c tP r o d u c tS C ME R PP r o d u c tD BM E SL M SB 2 BI n vM G M TUntitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementDuring the early 1990s, business process reengineering focused on improving the business processes of anenterprise and was mostly a management strategy with ad hoc use of tools, not an explicit focus on automation.Later in that same decade, companies began deploying Enterprise Resource Planning systems designed toautomate and manage processes common to every company, such as general ledger, accounting, ordermanagement, sales, etc. The ERP wave was much more focused on automation and less on optimizing theunique business processes of an individual company. Companies deploying ERP systems weren t really creatingnew competitive advantages they were simply keeping up. ERP systems led to some significant increases inefficiency and control, but carried the cost of creating processes that were set in stone. It is time-consumingand expensive to change how ERP systems work and therefore most companies ended up with processes that,ironically, are constrained by the very systems designed to optimize them.Business process management is the next evolution of these previous initiatives, picking up where the others leftoff and applying previous lessons to more complex, and more strategic, process challenges. We define BPM as:A strategy for managing and improving the performance of a business through continuous optimization ofbusiness processes in a closed-loop cycle of modeling, execution, and measurement.If you look at the most successful companies in your industry and describe what they do best, you ll usually findyourself talking about one of their business processes. They may be fastest to market with innovative products,or the time they require to fulfill an order, approve a loan, or resolve a customer problem may be especially short,or their costs exceptionally low. Increasingly, competitive advantage in business depends on the ability to excel incritical business processes, which is why BPM, and tools that help manage business processes, are such animportant focal point for today s leading businesses. One of the true innovations of BPM is the linkage betweenthis specific management discipline and a comprehensive technology approach that supports each step of theBPM solution lifecycle: analysis and modeling, design and implementation, execution and operation, and meas-urement and optimization.BPM suites: What s in the box?As a management discipline and a strategy, BPM is obviously more than just software. But software is increas-ingly an important component of BPM, and often helps organizations realize its virtues faster and more reliably.The italicized words in the definition above are typically the areas of BPM that software helps address.BPM software is most commonly referred to as BPM suites (BPMS). BPMS typically provides a set of integratedtools that support designing, measuring, monitoring, analyzing, optimizing, and continuously improving businessprocesses. A comprehensive BPMS should include capabilities that support the following:2Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process Management3CapabilityDescriptionModelingTools non-developers use to model business processes end to end, making the rules, roles,and sequence of activities explicit in structured diagrams.Simulation and Analysis Tools those same users are provided to compare current key performance indicators (KPIs)with projected improvements using simulation analysis, improving the accuracy and effective-ness of the project before it is passed to developers to implement.Design and Implementation An integrated set of software tools that IT and developers use to link activities in the modelwith different IT systems.ExecutionAn engine that automates the process by executing the model, monitoring KPIs and othermetrics continuously, and providing real-time alerts and remediation actions to users whenthose metrics begin to go off track.Executing the model means automating the human workflow, integrating disparate businesssystems, and enforcing business rules that ensure compliance with policies and best practices.InteractionWeb-based workspace that allows administrators and process owners to manage deployedprocesses, helps end-users manage their activities, and displays KPIs and performancemetrics to process owners. Also, allows integration to common environments end-usersinteract with, including email and desktop productivity tools.MeasurementKey performance indicators as the business analyst defines in the process model are monitoredand recorded by the execution engine. Alerts can be sent on KPI thresholds and dashboardscan display aggregate KPI information to assist analysis and decision-making.Monitoring and Auditing As processes run in the execution engine, it collects and archives comprehensive data thatcan be used for real-time monitoring and for auditing of processes executed in the past.BPMS provides a closed loop system for achieving business performance improvement. Business analystscan build and analyze process models without knowledge of their executable implementation. Processanalysts typically in IT, but not programmers extend those models with data definitions and executabledetail.Completed process designs are then deployed to the process engine, which routes tasks to humanparticipants, integrates the actions of external business systems, and automates exception handling. Theprocess engine also captures snapshots of performance information from all running processes, allowing thatinformation to be aggregated and displayed in management dashboards, providing an instant view of end-to-end performance and drilldown to specific bottlenecks. Actual performance data can then be fed back into themodel in preparation for another round of performance improvement.Software tools have been used before to aid with business process improvement. A variety of modeling toolsare available and in some companies, they are used extensively to capture and catalog business processes.However, this kind of modeling has traditionally been considered separate from implementation of the actualcode that automates the business process and the subsequent operation and monitoring of that process.This is where BPM suites are different. A BPM suite takes an integrated view of the complete solution lifecycle,tying modeling together with the implementation and execution of a business process. One of the most impor-tant means to achieving this is the notion of a shared process modelthat is used across all the stages of thelifecycle. This integrated approach closes the gap between what the business would like to do and what ITactually does.Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementFor IT, BPMS represents a new way to implement business solutions, emphasizing less programming andgreater business involvement. For business users, BPMS represents a way to participate in shaping solutionsto fundamental challenges, working cooperatively with IT to improve business s performance. The result is asolution driven top-down by the business process, instead of bottom-up based on the IT systems.Five key benefits of BPMA focus on correcting the inefficiencies that pervade a business will have many positive effects, including reducingcosts, increasing revenues, and improving a company s competitive advantage. Investing in BPM as a disciplineequips an organization to better respond to change. Leveraging software to help institutionalize BPM within abusiness delivers a specific set of corresponding benefits:1. Innovation through analysisThe first key benefit BPMS helps realize is allowing a business to innovate existing processes on paper (beforecommitting implementation resources) as well as to project return on investment (ROI) through simulation analysis.Process modeling is the first step of nearly any BPM methodology, and any comprehensive BPMS will include aprocess-modeling tool that allows business analysts to document the current (as-is) process and specify new (to-be) processes in a structured way, and then project business metrics from those models using simulationanalysis. The analyst does not need to know the technical details of the implementation, just business-orientedparameters such as who performs each step and what that resource costs, how long each step on averageshould take, the relative probabilities of taking one flow path versus the other, etc.Modeling is an important first step because you don t want to simply pave the cowpaths in your organization.Many companies have no idea what an entire end-to-end process looks like, or why things are done the waythey are. In most cases, the processes in place today were put in place long ago, before the Web, virtual teams,Blackberries, and outsourcing began to affect the workplace. Modeling gives the business the opportunity torethink and simplify before plunging into design.2. Improved operational efficiencyOne of the biggest business drivers of BPM today is improved operational efficiency shorter cycle times,lower costs, and the ability to handle additional work with no increase in staff. Much of this benefit derives fromBPMS s workflow automation component. The process engine routes tasks to users, allowing them to takeaction directly from their Web-based workspace, managing task priorities and deadlines, and even automatingescalation procedures when exceptions occur or deadlines cannot be met. For example, Sallie Mae s BPM-based customer service process, shown in Figure 2, resulted in a 45 percent increase in productivity, saving 4.4 million in a single year, and reducing future headcount demands.3. Compliance and controlAnother key benefit BPMS helps deliver is improved control over business processes, fostering standardizationacross the company and compliance with regulations, policies, and best practices. Today s global enterprisesare far from homogeneous; new operating units are constantly being added through mergers and acquisitions,each with its own systems and procedures. Each division or geographic unit may have its own procedures aswell. Because BPMS includes a common set of tools used by developers, IT, and business participants to4Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process Managementmanage business processes, it drives standardization of procedures, policies, and business metrics across thecompany and ensures there is always one version of the truth. Process models can be shared in a repositoryand reused across the company. Moreover, every step of a running process can be logged, which not onlyensures compliance but makes that compliance easily auditable.4. AgilityAgility is a fourth key benefit of BPMS, helping businesses bring new products and services to market morequickly and respond more easily to changing requirements. The most common barrier to agility in the past hasbeen the dreaded IT backlog finding available resources capable of integrating diverse business systems,building custom Web applications, or writing code. BPMS avoids the IT backlog because it does not rely onprogramming; its process logic is like a flowchart, enhanced here and there with scripting. Executable designscan be created quickly and changed easily. Integration adapters make connecting to diverse business systemssimple, again without code. Reusable artifacts in the process component catalog further enhance agility. WithBPMS, implementation cycles are typically measured in weeks, not months or years.5. End-to-end performance visibility and optimizationA final key benefit of using BPMS is that it makes end-to-end performance visible to process owners, andprovides a built-in platform for problem escalation and remediation. As processes run, the engine is continuouslycapturing snapshots of instance data and aggregating them in visible performance metrics, both built-in anduser-defined. BPMS provides the ability to measure performance across organizational and system boundaries.It then provides tools that display these metrics graphically in management dashboards, often with drilldown toinvestigate the root causes of bottlenecks. Another capability, business activity monitoring (BAM), computes KPIsin real time and monitors them using rules that trigger automated alerts or process actions when they move out-side their target range. Process owners can respond instantly to events that affect the bottom line. 5Figure 2BPM allows processes to be auto-mated without programming,based on graphical designs thatcombine human tasks, applicationintegration, and business rules.Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementUnderstanding Service-Oriented ArchitectureWhat is Service-Oriented Architecture?Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to IT architecture that aims to manage the complexity ofITassets systems, applications, and databases making them easier to reuse, easier to integrate with eachother, and easier to evolve over time without disrupting the business solutions that rely on them. We defineSOA as:An architectural approach that enables the creation of loosely coupled, interoperable businessservices that can be easily shared within and between enterprises.SOA is adopted both as an architecture for newly constructed solutions and as a blueprint for restructuring andsimplifying existing IT infrastructure. By adopting SOA, IT departments achieve improved efficiencies, better respon-siveness, and more agility. While SOA is an important strategy for the business as a whole, its benefits mostlydirectly impact IT. One of the more challenging and important aspects of an SOA strategy is to correlate IT andbusiness benefits directly, so that the costs to IT can be measured against the benefits realized by the business.As with BPM, SOA initiatives require specific software technologies that are used to build a Service Infrastructure,and tools and frameworks that help service-enable existing systems. Not all SOA projects need every piece ofsoftware; their requirements depend on the nature of the project and which problems SOA is focused on tackling.Therefore, SOA products must be designed as independent, self-contained components that are prepared foreasy interoperability.Key technologies of SOAThere are several technologies associated with creating and managing a Service-Oriented Architecture, but for thisdiscussion we focus on the key SOA technologies that have a natural affinity for BPM. Those technologies include:Service bus:A service bus provides a necessary layer of intermediation in SOA, insulating services end pointsfrom direct connection to each other, and providing a powerful backbone for those services to plug into. AnESB is like a combination of our bodies nervous and circulatory systems, communicating messages betweenorgans through hormones released into the bloodstream. Like these two systems, the service bus ensures thatcommon services such as reliable messaging, routing, data transformation, and security are implementedand properly managed in production. In the context of BPM, the service bus intermediates services used withinbusiness processes. The ESB insulates the underlying systems, managing the service end points that aprocess connects to.Service registry:A service registry acts as a central location for managing the service lifecycle. A serviceregistry is similar to a Yellow Pages phone book, keeping a running record of available services and providing afacility through which services can be found. It makes an SOA more transparent by serving as the system ofrecord where services may be published and discovered for reuse, either in composing new applications or inadapting current applications to changing requirements.In the context of BPM, a service registry stores infor-mation about services that a process can connect to and thus pull data from underlying systems or triggersystem functions. During the design of a business process, developers can browse the service registry from6Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process Management7within the design environment and discover services that the process must interact with. The tool incorporatesthe interface and data models as part of the process design, and during execution the process engine willdynamically find the location of the service using information in the service registry. Finally, the service registrycan also register the business process itself as a service, allowing other systems to easily locate and interactwith it.Service repository: A service repository provides enterprise-wide visibility into an organization's software assetsby managing the metadata associated with any type of asset, from business processes and Web services topatterns, frameworks, applications, and components. An effective enterprise repository will map the relationshipsand interdependencies that connect assets to improve impact analysis, promote and optimize reuse, and meas-ure impacts on the bottom line. In the context of BPM, a service repository stores and manages all the artifactsused to implement BPM solutions, including process models, process templates, service components, and datamodels. When these artifacts are stored and managed by a service repository it helps business architects under-stand the relationships and dependencies between process models, service models, and data models across allBPM projects in the organization.BPM and SOABPM is a natural complement to SOA, and a mechanism through which an organization can apply SOA tohigh-value business challenges. Both SOA and BPM can each be pursued without the other, but the twoapproaches in concert offer reciprocal benefits.An organization can adopt a service-oriented approach to its architecture and enjoy the benefits of flexibility,reuse, and adaptability SOA confers, but applying that architecture to higher-value business challenges throughBPM yields more measurable ROI and greater direct impact to the business. Similarly, BPM by itself providesreal business value, but SOA eases the integration burden for process solutions and provides technologies tomanage the technical service components involved in a business process, increasing reuse and improving gov-ernance and manageability. There are many IT systems sufficiently compact and stable to optimally support BPM without SOA at first. Ifcompanies choose a BPM suite with sufficiently rich connectivity to underlying applications and databases,they will at first get the benefits of BPM without an SOA. But this initial success contains the seeds of its owndownfall: As more departments come online, more managers have a hand in controlling the IT environment.And as the system s growth necessitates more changes, the BPM solution will soon be suffering the coordina-tion, integration, and management problems SOA was invented to solve. Alfred Chuang, CEOBEA SystemsUntitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementRolling out SOA defining business services, building them, and deploying SOA infrastructure is often a multi-year effort, and most companies are just getting started. An organization can achieve BPM s benefits today, with-out waiting for the SOA rollout, or it can pursue the rollout of SOA through BPM. Organizations often pursue thetwo simultaneously, using BPM to prioritize those architectural elements that should first be service-enabled. BPMon SOA is thus a two-tiered approach:1) IT uses SOA to create coarse-grained, optimally reusable services, discoverable using a service registryand deployed with loose coupling on an ESB.2) Process analysts on the business side use BPM to create and optimize business process models, findingavailable business services that implement modeled activities and filling in the process glue as neededusing a BPMS s native design tools. Ideally, some processes created in the BPMS including those involvinghuman tasks could themselves be deployed as services, registered in the enterprise repository, andexposed for use by other service consumers, both inside the enterprise and out.Benefits of BPM on SOAAt enterprise scale, building BPM on top of a solid SOA foundation will make it more agile, more flexible, moreeasily proliferated across divisions and geographies, and more resilient to changes in underlying IT systems. Ontop of that, it allows some services required by the process to be outsourced to trading partners, and opensup brand-new business models in which the company s own processes can be exposed as services to newcustomers, both internal and external. This approach s benefits are clear:1. AgilityBusiness process solutions can be implemented more quickly from reusable coarse-grained parts. SOA sbusiness services are already pre-integrated internally and architected for business reuse, so there is no needto reinvent the detailed orchestration logic beneath their internal details. Essentially, SOA allows the buildingblocks of business processes to be larger and more easily reused. More effective reuse also carries the benefitof increased standardization and compliance at the enterprise level, and BPM applies that reuse to a variety ofhigh-value business challenges.2. ResilienceBusiness process solutions can be shielded from changes in IT assets. To the line of business, the logic behindorder processing, supply-chain replenishment, or customer-service requests should not depend on the versions,locations, or other details of the IT systems involved. On the other hand, keeping versions of software updated,migrating to new systems, and consolidating data centers is central to the solutions mission. SOA s loose cou-pling allows IT assets to evolve in an orderly way, without impacting BPM logic or performance visibility.3. Quality of ServiceProcess owners want to get all the BPM benefits we ve discussed, but usually just assume that the technologysolution is going to be secure, reliable, and fast. Such so-called Quality of Service is not built into baseline Webstandards. It can be added to BPM implementations by custom programming, but SOA s ESB makes it mucheasier to build and reuse. For example, instead of having every process that interacts with your SAP system callitdirectly using integration adapters, it is better to leverage a reusable business service managed under a8Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process Managementcentralized governance policy, invoked asynchronously for higher performance with reliable delivery and consistentfault handling. When scalable, reliable integration of mission-critical systems is required, SOA offers important andpowerful reinforcement to BPM.4. Business-IT collaborationBPM introduces a fundamental shift in organizational agility, delivered through a common focus on refining thebusiness through process excellence and the shared set of tools used to achieve it. BPM fosters a deepercollaboration between business analysts who identify and define processes, and the IT developers who implementintegrated processes and services. Companies that connect these two groups with common tools and sharedphilosophies are experiencing radical new efficiencies: The business discovers how quickly an agile architecturecan support its dynamic needs, and IT discovers higher-value challenges to apply that architecture to.BPM on SOA allows a cleaner separation of business and IT concerns in business process implementation.While BPM s promise to give the business more direct control over process implementations can make ITnervous, BPM on SOA fulfills that promise in a more IT-friendly way, since implementing and deploying businessservices is the explicit province of IT. Those services can be orchestrated using a business-defined processlogic without the risk of breaking anything.5. New business modelsOne of the most important benefits of SOA is that you don t have to do everything yourself, but can insteadreplace functions now performed internally with services performed by trading partners. Generally these are notend-to-end business processes, but isolated business services that can be performed more cost-effectively byothers. BPM on SOA allows even encourages such mixing and matching in business processes, clearingthe path to competitive advantage.9Figure 3BPM on SOA allows IT to architect,build, register, and deploy reusablebusiness services, which can be dis-covered and executed ( consumed )in business processes.E n a b l e sB u s i n e s sA g i l i t yE n a b l e sI T A g i l i t yB P M a n d S O A t o g e t h e rE n a b l e s b u s i n e s s a g i l i t y a n d I T a g i l i t yM e a s u r eM o d e lE x e c u t eI m p l e m e n tE x e c u t eM a n a g eI m p l e m e n tA r c h i t e c tP r o c e s s L i f e s t y l eS e r v i c e L i f e s t y l eu s i n e s sTC o n s u m e S e r v i c e sD i s c o v e r S e r v i c e sUntitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementBEA: Leading the wayImplementing BPM on SOA is not as simple as connecting BPM suite A to SOA stack B using open standards.This kind of baseline integration is always possible, but to make the combination work most effectively, theBPM and SOA tools need to integrate at key touch-points, share common infrastructure, and be supported bycommon design and management methodologies that reinforce the BPM-on-SOA design pattern. This meansrecognizing that service orchestration and business process management are not the same thing, and thatusing adapters to integrate enterprise business systems APIs directly from the process model is different fromusing them within the implementation of business services managed by SOA technologies, like a service bus orservice registry. It also means recognizing that human tasks play a pivotal role in most business processes, andthat any enterprise BPM platform must include rich support for human workflow and interaction.Today, BEA Systems is leading the way toward BPM layered on SOA. BEA AquaLogic" BPM Suite is anindustry-leading BPM suite that provides modeling and simulation analysis, executable process design supportinghuman workflow and application integration, a process engine, and end-to-end performance managementcapabilities. BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite is a part of the BEA AquaLogic Family, which includes additional award-winning technologies for managing SOAs, including BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, BEA AquaLogic Repository,and BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. While all of these technologies are designed for independence, they benefitfrom a shared design, common tooling, and pre-built connections between them, helping customers realize thebenefits of this powerful combination of software faster and at less cost.As an example, services deployed on BEA AquaLogic Service Bus can be auto-published to the registry, and a proxy service deployed on the service bus can use business services imported from the registry. BEAAquaLogic BPM Suite interoperates with both the service bus and the registry, and can directly import externalservices for use in business-process designs. UDDI interoperability enhancements now make it easier for BPMusers to discover, register, and use external services within the BPM design environment.The costs of waitingEvery organization focuses on improving itself and certainly, if business process management is not an explicitfocus within a company, it is at least an implicit set of activities among employees eager to improve theircompany s performance or their customers satisfaction. So why should you make BPM a mission, and whyinvest in specific software to help? And why now?The answer is simple! If you don t have a standard system for identifying broken processes, for modeling andthen simulating how processes shouldrun, for measuring the impact of process changes, and for implementingthose changes, you are potentially squandering a massive opportunity. BPM software offers a way to createeconomies of scale for managing all the processes that make your organization hum, equipping the people inyour organization with a common set of tools that make a difference. Until you have such a strategy for all theprocesses you want to optimize, you may be wasting money on dozens of separate initiatives:Reducing the resolution timefor customer service issues, customer complaints, or activities involvingcustomers:Iowa Telecom reduced the amount of time for a customer s request to change long-distanceproviders from five minutes to just 3 5 seconds, saving more than 1 million a year and freeing personnel tofocus on other initiatives.10Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementAutomating processes with predictive steps, like expense reimbursement, new-hire approval, or simple dataanalysis:British Petroleum (BP) implemented a new Electronic Approval Process that handled the invoicingand approval processes for various BP lines of business, saving staffing costs and improving BP s relationshipswith its vendors by processing invoices faster.Optimizing exception handling for high-value processesto appropriate delegates for faster routing and shorterresolution times, like trade dispute settlements or insurance claims processing:CitiGroup implemented BPM tomanage and optimize the handling of complex exception scenarios that happen in automatic trade processing.This allowed them to process more trades on time and thus recoup revenue lost due to expired trades.Modernizing paper-based or legacy processes, reducing capital costs and improving the efficiency ofroutine work, increasing visibility along the way:GreenPoint Mortgage took their entire loan-origination processfrom a manual, paper-based process to a fully automated one using digital document management. Thisenabled GreenPoint to optimize the process and do more parallel processing of mortgages, reducing process-ing times from weeks to days.Bringing new products or services to market fasterwith less overall cost to the business:Sallie Mae inte-grated data from eight systems, saving the company money and improving its ability to serve its customers.Complying with federal regulationsor industry guidelines like Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA:First Horizonautomated its process for verifying customer data, meeting the compliance requirements of the Know YourCustomer provision of the USA Patriot Act.These are the real costs of not having a cohesive and comprehensive BPM strategy. In place of one-off invest-ments that optimize a single process for just one function, or just one audience, in just one business, a BPMsystem can serve as a more cost-effective, company-wide platform for designing, measuring, analyzing, andcontinuously improving business processes, and the business itself.The bottom lineIn today s global, digital, on-demand environment, managing business processes is an imperative, not achoice. But it s not always easy. The important processes the ones that really drive businesses forward arerarely confined within a single business function or IT system. When you examine those processes end to end,from initial customer request to final disposition, they invariably wind across organizations, each with its ownrules and management structures, and across disparate IT systems that were never designed to talk to eachother. Moreover, you ll probably find that the very same business process is performed differently in each divi-sion and geography, using different rules and performance metrics.Crossing functional, organizational, and geographic boundaries within an enterprise invariably creates inefficien-cies and errors. The difference between cycle times of two weeks and two days might be traced to a week sdelay in the handoff between organizations. The difference between bringing new products to market in weeksrather than months can come down to the ability to integrate existing IT systems rather than having to startover with new ones.11Untitled DocumentBEA White Paper Extending the Business Value of SOA Through Business Process ManagementBPM and SOA are two powerful approaches to helping businesses solve these challenges. And software toolsrelated to each, when integrated, offer the most comprehensive approach to real business transformation.What to do next?Whether you re just beginning your journey with SOA or BPM, or already well on your way, BEA has amasseda wealth of information to help you, and offers solutions to meet your needs. BEA offers a wide variety ofresources at its SOA Resource Center, including a self-service SOA assessment to analyze your SOA readiness.Visit the BEA SOA Resource Center at bea.com/soa. BEA offers a similar readiness assessment for BPM atbea.com/bpmready. Finally, you can learn more about the BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite, and read customer casestudies, BPM market research, and analyst reports, at bea.com/bpm. Join the BEA communityAt BEA, we understand that developers need different kinds of resources than IT managers. And that architectsface different challenges than executives. That s why we ve created four unique communities that give youexclusive access to a formidable group of your peers, to a world of shared thinking, and to the kind of mean-ingful information that can make you more effective and more competitive. To join one or more of the BEAcommunities, simply register online at bea.com/register.About BEABEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. The BEA SOA 360 platform, the industry s most unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization, is designed toimprove cost structures and grow new revenue streams. Information about how BEA is enabling customers toachieve Business LiquidITy"can be found at bea.com.12Untitled DocumentCWP1490E1206-1ABEA Systems, Inc.2315 North First Street San Jose, CA 95131+1.800.817.4232+1.408.570.8000bea.com
