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Customer: “I want to automate my processes in a heterogeneous environment.”

IDS: “No problem, but if you describe end to end processes you have to decide what middleware infrastructure will be the ruling one.”

Customer: “I use SAP applications, some own developed applications and as middleware IBM WebSphere plays a role. Therefore no system has the lead.”

IDS: “If an end to end process runs from SAP over other applications, back to SAP and so forth there has to be exactly one engine that rules the process flow. In your case this could be done either by SAP PI or by IBM WebSphere. Also possible is to use SAP PI to control all process parts that stay in the SAP applications and to use WebSphere for the global processes.”

Customer: “I do not understand how I can include e.g. a SAP procurement process in a global IBM controlled processes. It is not possible to let only one engine control everything at top level.”



A similar dialog was part of several discussions I had with customers about business process driven automation in the past. It takes often considerable time to convince them that their requirements and the decision for one responsible engine are not contradictory. In the following I want to explain and discuss this assumption in detail.



When processes are modeled today, normally a sequence oriented notation is used, e.g. EPC at business level or BPMN and BPEL at technical level. The process diagrams describe the flow logic of activities and for every process step is defined, what happens at runtime (call of a service, display a dialog or screen). The process engine reads the process diagram and executes the flow logic. If a diagram describes an end to end process therefore only one engine (see picture, Engine A) can be responsible for this process.

Process Engine A



As shown in the picture there can be another process, run be a different engine B. This process will be considered by the outside world as service (and therefore offers a WSDL interface). When engine A executes the top level process and comes to the second step, it calls the service and the detail process is run by engine B. Of course engine A could also be responsible to run a detailed process as shown on the right side of the picture. All parts of a process that will be implemented in the same system or application can be put into a detailed process and run by a special engine, but at the border points between these process parts we need the overall responsible engine.



Sometimes there is the argument, that it would be enough to throw a special event at the end of a detailed process. An enterprise service bus should catch this event and start the next detailed process. This is nothing else than to move the end to end business logic into the ESB. It is possible but leads to a loss of transparency, because the complete process view disappears. A similar approach comes with event-driven architectures, I will discuss their advantages and problems in a later article.



My conclusion is, and the experiences from different customers prove this, that the decision for the leading process engine is one of the first that has to be made in an automation project. Kind of a best practice decision has been made by a big German customer, where SAP and IBM technology were set as standard. The SAP internal processes will be automated with SAP middleware, the overall processes by IBM WebSphere. And, very important from IDS point of view, all of the processes are modeled with ARIS and used as input for the different implementation tools ;-)

by Tobias Conz
Posted on Mon, 10/12/2009 - 08:57

Hello Uwe,

i totally agree with you, that you need a leading process engine and the scenario is getting even more interesting when you have human activities (steps performed by a human being supported by the system - like entering data) in your process. To performe them in a process, you need a task server which is responsible to deliver the tasks to the responsibles and forward the process afterwards on the process enigine.

So you also have to decide if you use the Universal Task List from SAP or an other product.

greets tobias

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