Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Capturing Business Events @Oracle BPM 11g

        This blog will be the first in series of blogs I will be writing on Oracle BPM suite. In this blog I will look at different options available in Oracle BPM for tracking and monitoring the business process. So how do we get started on monitoring part? In BPEL we used to have sensors and it can be monitored on BAM dashboards, AIA had audit logging mechanisms which we had to invoke to get the information logged. In BPM we have BAM Data Objects as well as BPM Process Cubes. So what/how do we feed these monitoring mechanisms? That’s what we will be focusing on in this blog.

Capturing the business events
To get started with this the analyst need to follow the below steps
  1.     Identify KPI’s and process metrics
  2.  Create Business indicators to capture metrics
  3.    Identifying Sampling points for capturing business indicators
  4.   Enable publishing using BAM  or BPM Process Cubes
  5.    Validate and deploy
  I will be focusing on the initial 3 steps, as step 4 is on enabling the BAM Data objects and BPM Process cubes, step5 on deployment.
1.    Identify KPI’s and process metrics
First step will be to identify the KPI’s and process metrics. KPI’s help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. They are quantifiable measurements, agreed to beforehand, that reflect the critical success factors of an organization. Process metrics are measurements of the steps of a process. Steps generally have completion milestones, and processes are generally measurable in business terms such as timeliness and cost. 

2.    Create Business indicators to capture metrics
Business Indicators are project data objects that are used to store the value of the KPI’s of your process. i.e they can store the value of an indicator you want to measure in your process. Oracle BPM gives you 3 options to define business indicators, and it needs to chosen based on the information type of the value.
a.    Dimension
It defines specify how the data need to be picked. Dimension store the value of a KPI that you can use to group the values of the measure business indicators in your process.
eg:-region,ordertype
b.    Measure
Measure will help you capture numerical data which signifies a value which will help you in analytics
Eg:-salestotal
c.    Counters
Counters are type of measures used for no.of occurrence, keeps track of the number of times an instance completes a certain activity

3.    Identifying Sampling Points for capturing business indicators
                At runtime when the BPMN Service Engine runs the activity in the process it stores data about the process to the BPM Cubes and Oracle BAM Data Objects. This data comes from the sampling points defined in the project.
          Sampling points are broadly divided into two.
 a.    Build-in Sampling Point
-          configured  at project, process and activity level
o    generate sampling for all user tasks
o    generate sampling for start/end of process
o    generate sampling for start/end of activity
-          Dimensions are always captured
-          Sampling point settings can be overridden at different levels.

b.     User defined Sampling Point
- Measurement marks
Measurement marks store the following data into the Process Analytics databases:
      • The value of the process default measures
      • The value of the measure business indicators associated to that measurement mark
      • The value of the dimensions defined in the process

(i)    Single Measurement
To sample business indicators at a specific point in process
(ii)   Counter Mark
It is used to track the number of times the instance runs the particular activity
(iii)                Interval(start & end)
This will measure a business indicator in a section of your process Always use these measurement marks to monitor critical sections of your process
 What Happens @ Measurement Marks
The BPMN Service Engine stores the values of the measure business indicators associated with the pair of measurement marks to the Process Analytics databases. It also stores the values for the dimensions and default measures for that process section.
That’s pretty much for today on the capturing of business events in BPM.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi

I read this post two times.

I like it so much, please try to keep posting.

Let me introduce other material that may be good for our community.

Source: KPI metrics

Best regards
Henry

Anonymous said...

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Thanks and Regards,
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