What is the role of BPM (BussinessProcessManagement) in a realtime application?
I mean in which cases or where is BPM actually used?
I could get the documentation from the net, but where actually is it used?
One definition of BPM is that is combines workflow management (humans interacting) with enterprise application integration (EAI, systems interacting). You can get applications and tools for those applications - sometime embedded - which you can use to define you business process. Then, in a staging process, you can roll out the business process to that system or a set of applications. To execute a business process (BP) you can use a business process engine (e.g. jBPM), and each step of a business process can be represented by a user interaction, a user task, a system task or variations of these. You can have parallel business steps that only once all of these complete can go to the next business process step. And there is much more to that.
Once you have rolled out a business process you can monitor it and collect data for a number of parameters. Often you will be interested how long a business process took and what the limiting factors are, e.g. how many manual steps are required. Then you can go back to the designer tool and modify the process. With data taken from the production system you can then simulate whether your changes are actually an improvement. And if they are you roll it out replacing the previous version.
On a smaller scale you can workflow designer or business process designers to allow user changing a particular part of a process. Often applications have hard-coded business process support with only limited parameterization/configuration. Take an approval process. Which purchases need approval? By whom? Could multiple people approve in parallel thus shortening the purchasing process? You application may offer your users to design the approval process as needed. It would no longer be hard-coded and allow for much better adaptation to the needs of your customer.
These are just a few thought and definitely not a full coverage of this subject. But maybe it already gives some idea.
BPM can be used in Health care application for integrating various systems and in banking field for loans aplication processing where human involvement is involved in different steps for loans approval, and in health care industry it is used mostly used for bundle of claims which we receive every day for cliams processing and for business state in which state to know.
and in The airline Reservation System for ticket booking process how the process moves one one level to another ex: adding passenger to flight.
Related
I have some questions that I am hoping someone out there will be able to answer for me.
Our situation is that we are considering a ground up replacement for an existing system. Firstly I will describe the existing system that we have.
We are currently operating on a pure object stack. The enviroment is OO and the database is OO. We currently have 3-4 million lines of code which was developed by 2-3 people, and we currently have a development team of 6, which continues to develop. The initial development started in 1997, and we have many clients installed. The environment is 64-bit, language and database, mulit-lingual, and is UNICODE. The operatiung system we use is Windows (latest versions). We have a number of modules which are delivered via a thin client (not browser), and the bandwidth usage is very low (Operates on 64KB WAN network performance level which is still prevalent in some countries in which we operate, i.e. the infrastructure is poor). Our biggest implementation is for one of the biggest companies in the world, and the target is to deliver the functionality for 30+ countries from one system instance (one physical db) for that client, and deliver the functionality using thin client to all countries from one set of application servers (the application servers are located with the db server and perform all of the processing), the thin client deals with the interactions with the users and the display of the data and collection of the data only. The system is used by 1000s of users, on the thin client. We also have mobile and portal components also, which are developed in C#, they are a small segment of the overall system and connect using APis. There are maybe 1000 mobile application users, with a final number expected to be 5000 mobile users. Within the system there will be 500000-1000000 vendors, with each vendor expected to have at least two transactions every single day.
The DB itself is partitioned, and replicated to a number of locations in real time. The final size of the DB when implementation is complete is expected to be in the 2TB range, and the current system will deal with that, no problem. The way the replication works is that there are mutiple replicated enviroments on hot-standy, i,e. all application servers and API servers are replicated. Our largest client routinely (once per month) performs scheduled windows updates, and when this occurs the primary environments are automatically rolled over to the secondaries, so the system remains available all of the time. In subsequent months, the system is rolled back to the primaries, this transition is very fast, i.e. real time.
At our largest client, the system was installed in 2014, and since that time it has not experienced any outage, except for planned outages because of server maintenace of whateveer in that time period, i.e. it has not crashed or faulted in the first three years of operation. For the purposes of providing updates and enhanced functionality to the target organisation or specifically one of their subsiduries in the countries in which they operate we are able to make changes to the system, via the loading of functional updates on-line. This is a very important component of my question, as for many years we have been able to update at one central location and have the new functionality immeadiately available to all users in all countries whilst they are continuosly using the application. This is without change to any .EXE or .DLL or whatever files that the end user is operating. This is a huge advantage for us currently, as many of the organisations we provide services to do NOT allow any change to EXE or DLL files on end user devices, and there is generally some approval process which takes some days and requires manual intervention by the users to make this process happen.
For further information, we have a support team of 6 providing support services to all of our clients in all of these countries, we operate three shifts of 2 people to provide these services. So this should give you some background to the stability of the system and the level of support we provide. Our service level is described as outstanding. We do have of course SLA agreements in place and we have not violated any SLA term ever.
So, now for my question. What technology would people choose to replace such a system, and how many people would it take to replace ? It has been recommended to me that C# and SQL server be used to replace this, and that it would take a couple of good people a year or two to re-develop from the ground up (we have all of the functional specifications from the last 20 years to work from). However, without having in depth knowledge of this technology stack I am quite concerned about the time period (I think it is very optimistic), I am concerned about the scaleability of the SQL server, and most importantly I am deeply concerned that we will loose this advantage that we have enjoyed that allows us to change the functionality of the current system via updates online without effecting logged on users. I am told that this sort of thing is just not possible in C# and if we have to provide an update to fix a bug, or provide new functionality then all users will have to replace the effected EXE and DLL files, i.e. all of them, 1000s of users would have to do this each and every time we update. This would be done automatically via a process called OneClick, but I am assuming if there is a company policy within our client environment that EXE changes are not allowed, then OneClick will not be viable. I am told if we took a browser approach to the new development then any updates would be server side (which is better), but, would still require an outage to apply updates.
Finally, more information on the online updates that are now possible. Currently all of the systems are replicated for disaster recovery and 100% uptime during update purposes. When we currently update our systems (at one central location) those logical updates are automatically applied at all replicated systems also without user intervention. Another concern that I have is that as well as the problem we face with updating multiple locations with the same update, which it seems is a requirement in C# or so I am being told, we will also have all of the replicated systems to update manually as well. As you can see our support team is small, so I am worried about a future blowout in maintenance resources required to maintain all of this, and then the cost in terms of times fixing mistakes that may creep in with all these additional tasks that may be required to perform the same exercise that we currently do only once.
Finally, a final peice of information on how we currently do updates. If the update is structural in nature, i.e. changes the physical structure of the database, then an outage is required, a full system down outage. When we apply the update the structural change is made, and this is automatically replicated across all secondary (standby enviroments). The users are not effected in terms of the software for the thin client or browsers. They simply log back on after the outage is complete. We currently have a window at a set time, once per month to perform these updates, however, it is rarely required. Once per week, we have a window for functional changes to be applied, and these are appled on line whilst the users are all on line performing their daily and periodic tasks.
So, if anyone out there can give me some insight into what technologies are available for such a system replacement or whether C# and SQL server can provide the necessary services and performance we actually need, i.e. I would be particularly interested to know whether in fact C# applications can be updated in real time, then that would be fantastic. We are obviously in the very early stages of this process in terms of how this should be done, so any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated and will save many hours of research.
Thank you in advance.
From the basic requirements you describe, my first thought is that you should probably adopt a full Web-based solution for your system, that way all updates can be done centrally without too much negative effect on your client access.
But if I understand correctly your question, one aspect you're requiring is to have executable code ready at the client-side (so a pure Web-solution won't work).
In that case, something that can quickly & easily update at the client side is needed.
We've been using the node.js and MongoDB stack for a few years now, there are some quite interesting effects of using pure scripts for your business logic: besides being easy to develop, the scripts themselves, when designed with certain guidelines, can perform "hot reload" on the fly to update your business logic. So this is what I'd recommend trying / looking at.
Efficiency of node.js and the flexibility provided by NoSQL DB such as MongoDB is well described in many places if you do a simple Google search.
In my project
We crawls x number of server.
Number of user for each server varies from 1 to n.
We crawls 1 to z item for each user.
Currently we are monitoring QOS using graphite. We are storing time taken to crawl the item.
x.time_taken
Problem with this approach is that if only single user is affected we get false alert about QOS.
What will be the correct tool/technique to answer/monitor following points:
Alert only if minimum k user are affected. [Not number of events]
List of user which were affected.
I think graphite and statsd is not correct tool for this. What will be better tool for answering those two question ?
What you are asking for is often called Service Monitoring. For very good reasons you want to know the service impact of an event, rather than just that an event has happened.
The advantage of this approach is exactly as you state in your requirements - you can focus on events which impact a large part of your user base and you have a list of the users affected right away.
The main drawback, IMHO, is that Service Monitoring is usually much more complex than simple performance or event/alert monitoring. It also often relies on a service model, which in my experience is something that is hard to build and even harder to keep up to date.
For example if a server in your system shows a significant slow down or failure, depending on your architecture this may impact all users who use a service that relies on that server, or it may impact a very small subset, or even none at all initially, if there is a load balancing mechanism or redundancy mechanism in place.
You would need to reflect this architecture in your service monitoring model, and also change it every time you update your system architecture or deployment.
If your system is static enough or critical enough to warrant the investment then this may be worth your while. If not then a simple compromise may be just to update the graphing and alerting you are doing to alert when the average response time over a set number of users, or over all users on a server increases by a significant amount.
This may give you most of the benefits you are after without having to invest in the extra complexity of a service monitoring solution.
If you definitely are looking to expand your monitoring approach and want to stick with open source tools then I would start by looking at NAGIOS if your focus is on infrastructure, or there are quite a few web service monitoring solutions with Free Tiers such as pingdom:
http://www.nagios.org
https://www.pingdom.com
I really don't know anything about BPM.
In the BPM context, what exactly is an Inbox?
Is it a common place for emails like everywhere or is it a list of tasks to do?
you should try: http://www.bpm.com/Docs/Q2%20Business%20Agility_BPM%20for%20Dummies.pdf
But yes, an inbox is usually a screen containing a list of the pending task for a particular user.
Cheers
In a BPM package you build business processes, for example a hire employee process. After the process has been designed you can instantiate it. In this example if you want to hire an employee you instantiate that process. An instantiation of this process is a case. And cases are what you see in your BPM Inbox. More specific, a case of which a task is assigned to you which is not completed yet. Look at it as your BPM work to do list.
BPM (business process management) is a standard way to design & excute "business processes" in an enterprise environment. Usually this involves 'human interaction' with the system(in plain terms some code that defines the flow of the business process), although thats not necessary always. This human interaction with the system processes is called 'workflow'.
So In case if there is any human activity in this automated process, this is communicated to the user typically in email -like interface called workflow user interface, which he can use to perform his action such as approve, reject, escalate to next level etc. So a BPM user's inbox usually contains the jobs that need his attention depending on his user profile as defined by the BPM system's user management component.
My organization is building a new version of our ticketing site and is looking for the best way to build an online waiting room when the number of users in our purchase path exceeds a certain limit. The best version of this queue would let new users in after existing users have either completed their purchase or have exceeded a timeout limit after entering the path.
I'm trying to get an idea of how this has been implemented by other organizations. Has anyone out there done something similar or have any experience with this? We have some ideas, but I'd like to get a sense of what solutions have been tried and what problems those solutions have run up against.
Just to be complete, this site is being built in Ruby on Rails, though I'd love to hear about how people have solved this regardless of platform.
Edit: To clarify: The need for the queue is not primarily to reduce load, but to limit the speed at which the web is purchasing tickets relative to people buying in other ways, like over the phone.
Before I outline one method for this, I want to point out that what you want to do doesn't make a lot of sense. Services on the web aren't like a physical store, where I can walk up and see that it's crowded and decide to stay or not. Queueing people on your site strikes me as shifting the blame from you (unable or unwilling to adequately provision resources) to me (punishing me for trying to use your site).
If you're selling something like show tickets, where quantity is limited and each item is tied to a seat, I think it's better to reserve items and time out those reservations if they aren't paid for in a timely manner. Ticketmaster does this, and I think it's a much better solution than blocking people at the door.
If you still want to go down this path, then I'd design the system like this:
As customers come to your site, record their arrival time. As they interact with the site, record a "last seen" time. "Last seen" will be used to determine activeness. You'll need a background job running very frequently to expire sessions quickly.
Once your limit is hit, you have an ordered queue of people who are blocked. As customers complete their transaction or time out, you'll mark the next person in the queue for entry into the purchase path.
For queued users, their browsers will make a request on a regular basis, checking to see if you've let them in yet. If yes, they proceed to the purchase path. If no, they continue to wait.
The purchase path needs a mechanism to check if someone is trying to circumvent your waiting area, and sends them back.
You might find the Online queuing for ticketing guide helpful. Check their repository at GitHub.
They've integration with Ruby On Rails, PHP, .NET, iOS, Android and similar platforms.
Queue-it enables you to gain control of website overload during extreme traffic peaks by offloading end users into an online queue.
When a peak traffic event occurs on a website, the online queue system sends users to the virtual waiting room environment where the users wait and are redirected back to the website at a rate it can handle.
I work in an IT department that is divided into two groups. One group develops and manages applications, the other manages the company's infrastructure and servers. One of the problems we face is a break down in communication. I work for the application group and one of the problems I have is not being notified when a server is taken down by infrastructure, or a database is being refreshed.
Does anyone have suggestions on how to improve communications between the two groups or any ideas on how to keep a light-weight log across multiple systems (both linux and windows)? Ideally it would be nice if we could have our boxes just tweet their statuses or something.
Thanks for the help,
Ben
One thing you could do to communicate server status is to have our Infrastructure group setup a network monitoring system like Nagios. This will give everyone in your application group the ability to get a snapshot view of the status of every server in the system. Having this kind of status is invaluable when you are doing development.
Nagios gives you network monitoring, but also allows you to show scheduled down time for a particular server in the system.
Another thing your group could do to foster communication with the Infrastructure is to have your build system report which servers it is currently using for building and testing your products.
Also, setting up regular meeting between stakeholders of both groups is probably a good idea too. If you all are talking to each other, even for 15 minute a week, you'll probably see incidents like the one you described above go down quite a bit.
I think this is a bigger issue of change control.
You should have hardware and software change control and an approval process.
Ultimately, infrastructure serves you - the purpose for IT infrastructure is to run applications.
In my current large financial data company, servers are not TOUCHED without proper authorization through the client and application groups. It seems like a huge pain, but every single server is there for a reason - to meet a specific business goal and run a specific application. There is simply no excuse for the infrastructure group to be changing things or upsetting servers on their own volition.
Response to critical hardware failure might be an exception.
Needed software and OS updates are handled through scheduled maintenance windows and an approved change process.
I like the Nagios idea as well. If you want to setup something that's more of a communication tool, I would recommend a content management system like Drupal.
We use Drupal internally to communicate between teams. When one team takes a server down, they would add an event into Drupal. The rest of us would either get it as an email, an RSS item or just by refreshing the page.
Implement a change control process where changes are submitted, approved and scheduled for BOTH groups. This lets everyone know what is going on. This process can be as light or heavy-weight as you want.