We built solutions based on this product in pretty much all domains, from retail to banking and finance, communications and utilities, and various industries (namely, the aerospace industry), as well as public sector, from applications, which deal mainly with approval processes and auditing needs, to a full blown Service Management ERP for a large retailer.
Their Case Management set of features is severely lacking and should be a target for immediate improvement dealing with unpredictable processes inside of organizations.
We’ve been using this with our customers for the past seven years. We've been using the 12c version for the past three years.
We had quite a few problems regarding stability, namely in the 11g version. From 12c onwards, we registered a significant quality hike with the latest incarnations being very stable.
No. We have customers generating more than 150,000 processes per day without performance issues.
Technical support is an Achilles' heel for all Oracle products, and this is no exception. It takes forever (several months) to have an issue resolved.
Yes, we used Microsoft technology-based process platforms, such as K2 and Captaris Workflow, but they just didn’t cope with standards (BPMN 2.0) and were particularly weak when you needed a full-fledged, all guns blazing solution.
Setup process improved immensely with the 12c version, and it’s very well documented. No issues.
As with all Oracle products, the licensing over VMware is an issue. You have to license the whole hardware, not just the amount of CPUs you actually use. I would suggest to go to Oracle VM if you need to virtualize this platform.
Also, check the current Oracle process-based platform in the cloud (Oracle Process Cloud Service), as it may serve your needs, and it’s much cheaper to start and run.
Yes. IBM BPM, Appian, K2, and Captaris.
Get a few guys very good an Oracle’s application server suite of products, namely WebLogic, as well as good Oracle DBAs. They will ensure very good platform health and no technical issues with the product.
Today I’d like to highlight a nice feature of the newest Oracle BPM
Suite Release. I am very happy that Oracle enriched the Suite with
certain Case Management functionalities that fit into the existing
Service Component Architecture (SCA). In the past month I already had
the chance to play a bit with the beta software. With this post I’d like
to share some of my experiences.
Why Case Management?
Business Process Management becomes more and more important. With BPM
Suite processes can be modeled, implemented, simulated and executed in a
multi-user environment. There are also a lot of different reports
available to monitor processes during runtime. We see in our projects,
that this kind of automation is especially valuable for processes which
are based on routine work. Some examples are “Hiring”, “Order-to-Cash”,
“Order Management”, “Travel Request Management” and so on.
However - we also notice quite a high amount of processes, which are too
complex and too flexible to model them in BPMN. We call it
knowledge-intensive work. Of course if you have a lot of time you might
be able to model almost everything but is it a benefit to have processes
which are not readable anymore? How fast is your time-to-market? How
easy is it to implement process changes? How can you support the job of
the knowledge worker? Some typical domains with a high amount of
knowledge-intensive work are Insurances, Banks, Healthcare, Civil
Services and Government Agencies.
Let me try to explain the need of case management with our RYLC example.
RYLC stands for “Rent your legacy car” and it was introduced in a
series of articles as an overall solution example. The main target of
RYLC was to explain concepts like service categories, loose coupling,
canonical data model, service security and much more (see SOA Spezial magazine
for details). The graphic below shows the complete End-to-End RYLC
process in BPMN notation from receiving the request, selection of the
car, checkout of the vehicle, returning it, creation of the invoice and
cash clearance. I highlighted the checkin-part of the process, which
covers the return of the car. It is based on an asynchronous message
exchange pattern - the process execution stops until the checkin is
completed or canceled. In this stage several things can happen.
|
| BPMN Example - Rent your legacy car (RYLC) |
|
| Key aspects in Case Management |
|
| Composite.xml with Case component |
|
| Definition of a Case |
|
| Definition of a Case Activity |
|
| Definition of a Case Rule |
|
| Monitoring of Case instances in EM |
With the new Case Management functionalities BPM Suite confirms its outstanding position. I couldn’t wait to play with the software and I am really happy to demonstrate the new product capabilities to our customers. What I didn’t mention so far is the importance of user interfaces and tight integration with content management systems like WebCenter. So there is more to come :-)
Disclaimer: The company I work for is partners with several vendors including Oracle
