I have been working on creating a course for PI developers so they could learn how to use Process Orchestration/BPMN. I was missing a good tutorial to get started with BPMN so I could help my customers move to the single stack.
So I decided to create a course on the topic of BPMN and PI. One of the things I learned most from was on interview with some of the people how have been suing BPMN for some time. In this blog I’ll share some of the information that I got from the interviews.
- BPMN is a beautiful tool that, we as PI developers, must understand how to use. Yes it was the word beautiful on a SAP product. Really nice. The reason is that it enables developers to draw the processes much better and is easier to understand. There is also the concept that there is the Business Rules Management (BRM) which makes some actions easier.
- BPM is easy to get started with. It was not so difficult to use if you had the background on ccBPM. The basic building blocks are much the same and then it can do a bit more. Most experts agreed that it was a good idea to start small and with a simple process. Then you could enhance it to make sure that you covered the business. If you stared with designing the full process you would have a hard time validating it.
- Performance is improvement is much better. So there is not the requirement to try to avoid using BPMN for all cost. With ccBPM the goal was to avoid using it because of the negative performance that it had. The people that I interview did not share this concern and thought that BPMN was a much better performing tool and the PO was a good solid platform.
- BPMN can be eliminated in many patterns in the migration. In a lot of instances we want can avoid using BPMN when migrating. A lot of ccBPM is from old releases of XI where we often had to create collect patterns and async/sync bridges. Well this mean that you will not end up having the same number of ccBPMs and BPMN if you do a migration. In some scenarios you may also end up creating new processes, to make the business process better supported.
- Data structures/message types is being validated much more. In ccBPM you could put whatever message into the process. BPMN requires you to have the exact data structure, so you will have to define the data as it are. This is giving some issues if you want to have idoc data into the process. One workaround is to use CDATA structures for the data you don’t want to define.
- Versioning can cause some challenges. The best is to use NWDI to handle the projects. NWDI did make all of the change management and version control much better. The challenge is that not all clients have NWDI. So there is the option to export the software components
You can get access to the all information on the interview at http://picourse.com/po
*) I don’t know if any of the issues has been change with the newer services packs, but this is the results of my interviews.