|
A single business process often depends upon multiple applications that gather input from throughout the enterprise. Business process management (BPM) systems help companies and their partners coordinate activities, enhancing flexibility and responsiveness. Firms stay coordinated -- even when strategy changes.
Automating an enterprise with BPM:
- Provides efficient tools to model and administrate business processes
- Empowers business managers -- the real experts in company businesses
- Promotes collaboration between managers, administrators and engineers
Solutions from ILOG
ILOG software components help companies improve business process automation by providing modeling and administration services:
| Process modeling |
|
| Process administration |
|
ILOG software components
ILOG software components can shorten development cycles significantly. Developers experience better time-to-market and reliability, while end users enjoy advanced BPM services.
ILOG JViews for Workflow provides a comprehensive set of components for building advanced business process modelers, real-time executive dashboards and performance analysis displays. ILOG visualization components help developers build intuitive user interfaces and effective graphical views of process models, process instances and consolidated execution data. Equipped with superior visualization, users can better model, monitor, analyze and optimize their business.
ILOG JRules allows software developers to create applications that can be maintained with minimal effort, combining rule-based and object-oriented programming to add business rules to new and existing applications. ILOG business rule components provide a complete system for capturing business policies that are subject to frequent market changes. Instead of relying on specially trained developers, business users can manage and maintain their own processes.
ILOG customers: AbaXX, Indra, Hyperwave, American Management Systems (AMS).
| ILOG affiliations: |
 |
 |
Intuitive process modeling
Developers can save months of work by using the prebuilt modeler delivered with ILOG JViews. Advanced modeling services produce powerful, easy-to-use solutions for business users and IT engineers.
- Diagram styling displays relevant information using labels and symbols tailored to various users. No coding required -- just change the style.
- Automatic layouts keep complex diagrams clean, even during editing.
- Modeler can be customized to fully support any type of standard (BPML, WSFL, XLANG) or BPMS object model.
- Developers can add their own interactions.
Flexible business policies support
Process models often contain complex routing conditions that introduce needless complexity using classic branching structure -- as well as added cost when market-dependent policies require frequent changes. Rule-based decision nodes and activities developed using ILOG JRules eliminate costly process changes.
- Complex conditions and business policies are expressed in a natural language accessible to all users
- Rules can be changed without modifying the process, even during execution
- Users can modify process and application data, and route the process
Process documentation
Documentation systems should adapt process views to individual user profiles: participants, business users, administrators, IT engineers. Using ILOG JViews, the system can dynamically build a process image, using a style defined for each type of user. The documentation system can use a Web server combined with ILOG JViews Servlet to publish both raster (JPEG) and vector (SVG) images to Web browsers.
Real-time monitoring cockpits
Supervisors need to monitor operations closely in order to anticipate, detect and solve problems. Business activity monitoring (BAM) is becoming a crucial part of BPM systems. Graphic views help users rapidly evaluate situations, make decisions and take action. The ILOG JViews cockpit enhances problem-solving by offering table, tree, charting and diagramming views of participants, processes, alarms and trends.
- The model designed at definition is reused for monitoring, with new symbols representing items like activity status, path and participants
- Process instances can graphically replay events, explaining the execution steps that resulted in an exception
- Navigation through various views and levels supports zoom-in and drill-down
- Cockpits are deployed as a desktop application for process administrators, and as a browser-based service for participants and occasional users
Business process event management
Unexpected events often occur during execution phases. These events can be critical, and need to be detected -- for instance, when a customer interacts with one process, that customer might need to be reminded to provide information required by another process. When a single source triggers cascades of alarms, flagging the proper alarm helps the process administrator identify the problem, and solve it. ILOG JRules ensures that business rules provide the proper solution to workflow engine events.
- Process administrators can modify rules or add them dynamically
- Rule engine can handle an extremely high volume of events
- Already used by most network supervision systems
Smart resource assignment
While all workflow engines manage resources assignment for individuals and manual activities, engines equipped with ILOG JRules can flexibly manage a much broader range of policies.
- Automatically reassigns activities when the load is unbalanced, or participants are absent
- Prioritizes premium customers who subscribed for better service and faster response
- Changes the order of work-list items to avoid bottlenecks or deadlocks
Business process intelligence
Most of ILOG JViews' real-time monitoring systems are maintained for offline analysis. Views display measurements like average duration, variations from expected duration and other trends. Performance data is mapped to the same process diagrams already familiar to business users and process administrators. These process-aware analysis tools improve decision-making, optimizing business processes throughout the organization.
| 
BPM:
