What purpose do BPMs solve?
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Chandru
Feb 19, 2010, 5:39:08 AM2/19/10
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Hi,
--
Chandra Sekar.S
Our company has planned to use jBPM in an upcoming project. I'm getting myself started with it now. Given my very little knowledge of BPM, I wonder what purpose does introduction of a BPM system solve to make it worth the investment?
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Chandra Sekar.S
Peter Thomas
Feb 19, 2010, 12:18:30 PM2/19/10
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Hi,
jBPM makes sense when some tasks in a workflow have to be actioned by humans. Do not use jBPM when you are just trying to run a bunch of say - batch jobs in sequence. Never use jBPM to do something synchronously in response to some UI action.
Pay attention to the hidden costs of any BPM tool. BPM looks good in powerpoint slides and block diagrams of your solution but may projects don't realize initially that you need to have a bunch of database tables in your schema somewhere dedicated for jBPM. When you deploy your application you have to also ensure your jBPM database tables are also initialized - which may be a pain when you do things like continuous integration . Whenever a workflow is processed, there are many queries behind the scenes (it tries to cache stuff as far as possible though) to these database tables - so there is a performance hit.
All that said, jBPM makes sense when most of your workflow has to be split off to humans, and especially when there are distinct roles and passing of work from one human to another based on rules (think of a flowchart). Ideally, it will be "worth the investment" if you can make changes to the rules (the flowchart) without impacting the rest of the system. Things like warnings if something is pending for too long, a task-list view for individual users, reports like "how many flows are active and are stuck in state X" come for free (or can be done with less effort) in a BPM tool / framework.
Hope this helps !
- Peter.
jBPM makes sense when some tasks in a workflow have to be actioned by humans. Do not use jBPM when you are just trying to run a bunch of say - batch jobs in sequence. Never use jBPM to do something synchronously in response to some UI action.
Pay attention to the hidden costs of any BPM tool. BPM looks good in powerpoint slides and block diagrams of your solution but may projects don't realize initially that you need to have a bunch of database tables in your schema somewhere dedicated for jBPM. When you deploy your application you have to also ensure your jBPM database tables are also initialized - which may be a pain when you do things like continuous integration . Whenever a workflow is processed, there are many queries behind the scenes (it tries to cache stuff as far as possible though) to these database tables - so there is a performance hit.
All that said, jBPM makes sense when most of your workflow has to be split off to humans, and especially when there are distinct roles and passing of work from one human to another based on rules (think of a flowchart). Ideally, it will be "worth the investment" if you can make changes to the rules (the flowchart) without impacting the rest of the system. Things like warnings if something is pending for too long, a task-list view for individual users, reports like "how many flows are active and are stuck in state X" come for free (or can be done with less effort) in a BPM tool / framework.
Hope this helps !
- Peter.
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Chandru
Feb 20, 2010, 1:07:38 PM2/20/10
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What exactly do you mean by tasks actioned by humans? I'm unable to visualize a real-world scenario!
Peter Thomas
Feb 21, 2010, 2:42:20 AM2/21/10
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"Loan Approval" is the example that everyone uses. See this pic:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0708_fasbinder/images/figure50.jpg
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal/0708_fasbinder/images/figure50.jpg
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