China Research Laboratory

End-to-End Business Process Integration and Management

        If you spent lots of time and money to build a small business process system and then grew out of it, what would happen? The old system would not be able to support the business and you might not have the resources to build a new system. Then what?

What does it do?
IBM China Research Laboratory has created a Business Process Integration and Management (BPIM) system to provide SMBs with a model-driven, process-centric approach for building BPI solutions.

What’s new

• An advanced two-dimensional business process modeling method to express internal flow logic as well as interaction patterns with the outside world.
• Having petri-net (a well-established mathematic tool for resource and process modeling) as the foundation so that quantitative analysis can provide valuable information for customers.
• A set of tools and a transformation engine to facilitate BPIM solutions

Customer Usability
With the Model Blue method and tools CRL has developed, user can:

• Have a powerful tool to model as-is business processes
• Assemble single business processes together and then model interaction relationship
• Check inter-model consistency and intra-model conflict to validate model
• Transform business models into an execution model (known as PLET – Processing Logic Engine & Tooling) to facilitate communication between business and IT staff.

Customer Reference
In 2002, CRL worked with an important banking customer in Taiwan on an EAI(Enterprise Application Integration) project. Model Blue helped the customer to build new financial products by integrating legacy banking systems in different locations (Taiwan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc). The method received high praise from the customer for its ability to describe their business requirements.

Technical Advantages
Model Blue provides a powerful modeling method that allows customers to easily describe their business processes as well as requirements, both in flow and information domain. The model is easy to understand for both business and IT people and thus can be used to bridge the gap between them.

By seamlessly transforming Model Blue to the PLET model, which is a lightweight implementation level model (with runtime) based on function de-composition structure, we have built a complete model lifecycle management approach that can be used to guide the entire BPIM engagement.

Customer Benefits

• Facilitating customer understanding and communication with common language among customer organization
• Reducing transformation risk
• Having a concise view of what are involved for a business transformation, from process flow to IT dept.
• Supporting process improvement/management
• Automating process guidance/execution support

IBM Benefits

• Solution & methodology call IBM middleware and SW/HW system as solution components.
  • End-to-end and full-function BPIM solution package, with integrated support for IBM offerings(i.e., WBI runtime)
    • Migration path to future IBM BPIM products (Holosofx, Rational, Dragonfly, ...)
    • Low-entry level and light-footprinted solution for SMB to practice business integration
• Focusing customer attention to transformation feasibility rather than the product components
• Reducing project risk, easy requirement capture and change
• Cost reduction in total project from requirement to implementation

Our contact: Jun Liu (Tony J Liu/China/IBM) and Yue Bo Yang (Yue Bo Yang/China/IBM)