Business application systems are typically no island systems. Customer data e.g. have to be available for the accounting system and likewise for the CRM system or the supply chain management system. To serve this requirement the relevant application systems have been interfacing each other on a one-to-one basis in the past and often still do today. For a given number of systems this results in a squared number of interfaces between these systems and leads to a very high number of point-to-point interfaces which negatively influences the operational and maintenance efforts for such a network. A release upgrade for one of the systems e.g. impacts large parts of whole network due to many cross-dependencies between the systems. To reduce the number of interfaces and to reduce complexity many organizations started to deploy Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) middleware.

                    

This will reduce the number of physical interfaces to the number of base systems.

This does, however, not automaically include the logical interfaces. If all business process logic remains in the base systems the number of logical interfaces remains the same as above including all shortcomings regarding release upgrades etc even though the number of physical interfaces has been reduced. This problem can be addressed by moving cross-applicational business processes to the middleware as well. Such a middleware would be called a Business Process Management (BPM) platform which combines interface technology with the ability to orchestrate automated business processes. Server oriented achritectures (SOA) are also based on this type of approach.

                                                  

The new challenges that are brought along with this type of architectures include the readability and thus the maintainability of busines processes which are implemented this way. Often the actual business processes are meshed up with technical requirements of the base systems in a way that renders the resulting complete not readable anymore. This leads to higher operational costs and dramatically decreases the agility of the deploying organization since every process change leads to high efforts.

To enable you to cope with these challenges People at Work Systems AG have developed a business process framework which e.g. completely seperates the actual business processes from technical sub-processes that are required by the connected base systems.

Based on our many years of experiencewe offer you tailored consulting packages to make your BPM project successful.

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