Few main concepts of business process management are briefly described below.
Business Process
A business process is typically a collection of related and structured activities or tasks, that depicts a business use case and produces a specific service or output. A process may have zero or more well-defined inputs and an output. During the execution of the business process, it executes its sub-processes synchronously or asynchronously for producing the final output. During the execution, it may interact with both humans or equipment.
For example, a banking customer requesting a bank load is a simple process. The following diagram depicts this process and through that, explains some of the key workflow components of a typical business process.
<Diagram>
Process Initiator: In the "Bank Load Request" process, a banking customer is the client who initiates a loan request.
Well-Defined Input: Banking customer provides the inputs required for the initialization of the process. It may contain the personal details of the customer, his financial information and accounts etc.
Request Processing: This is typically a sub process that produces an output internally during the execution of the business process. It analyzes the input data, verifies loan eligibility of the client through the execution of several logical expressions etc.
Human Task: This where a human interaction is involved in the business process. In this particular example, a bank employee sends an acknowledgement to the bank customer regarding his loan request approval.
Final Output: Sends acknowledgement. This is the final output which is sent back to the client who initiated the business process.
Process Instance
An instance of a process is a specific example of a process workflow. For example, if a particular process defines a banking customer requesting a bank load, then an example instance of this process is Mr. Smith requesting for 50,000 USD and getting approval for it. Every time a banking customer makes a request for a loan, that request triggers a new process instance in the BPM system, which flows through the elements of the process workflow according to its design.
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
BPEL is the de-facto standard for modeling executable Web service orchestrations. It is an XML-based language used for the definition and execution of business, as well as scientific workflows using Web services. WSO2 Business Process Server (WSO2 BPS) and Apache Orchestration Director Engine(ODE) are two WS-BPEL-compliant business process executable work-flow engines, which support composition of Web services by orchestrating service interactions.