Business Domain Process Execution Framework

The theory of Business Administration defines a BUSINESS PROCESS as a set of related, structured activities to be carried out in a coordinated sequence to jointly produce a business goal (typically a service or product).

NOTE: A process is a component of actions for a defined activity whilst operation is a multitude of processes and controls to ensure the delivery of something.”

In the context of BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION (BPA) a technology-enabled automated (business) process or auto. process represents the abstract notion of a (business) process with the formal signature of an asynchronous procedure of a computer program.

A auto. process is triggered or activated by an event with an optional input message. The asynchronous result of the auto. process could be used in turn as an event to invoke another process. Thus auto. processes are typically forming a process chain by comprising a set of sequential sub-processes or tasks with alternative paths, depending on certain conditions as applicable, performed to achieve a given objective or produce given outputs.
Each process has one or more mandatory inputs. The inputs and outputs may be received from, or sent to other auto. processes.
Technically an auto. process represents an abstract interface that gets implemented with auto. procedures. Business Administration defines a (business) procedure as a detailed instruction on how to execute one or more activities of a business process. Thus, translated into computing a procedure can be seen as (one of possible multiple alternative) programmatic implementation(s) of the abstract business process.

Configurable Automation

A typical solution's BPA module supports a highly flexible control of

• What event triggers which auto. process

• Which registered auto. procedure(s) are actually implementing an auto. process (to allow fine grained customization of functionality)

• Whether and how auto. processes are chained together

• When time-controlled events are about to occur (and then trigger any auto. processes)
  All these details of the actual auto. process execution can be controlled by means of configuration that is being applied during runtime (i.e. changes of the configuration are applied in real time).

By the combination of this construct one could dynamically design rich and complex process models also exercising well known patterns like:

• Pipes and filters (chain of responsibility)

• Queues and Sequential Convoys

• Scheduler Agent Supervisor

Automation Process Activity Monitoring

The BPA module provides an detailed internal high performance auto. process status tracking system that can be utilized for various monitoring (e.g. BAM) and auditing tasks.