Oracle Corporation :: Oracle Announces General Availability of Oracle(R) Business Process Analysis Suite: Their suite is built on the IDS-Scheer ARIS Platform suite of tools we are using as our standard business architecture platform, including process modeling. I'm hoping that we can pull the Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise business models into the enterprise-wide repository and utilize these standard processes as a framework to build our unique, value-added processes. And also integrate them with other processes that utilize PeopleSoft resources. Should be interesting.
I'm a tad bit peeved at the part of the announcement with some details of the suite's components, including the modeling piece called Architect (the standard ARIS tool is called Business Architect):
A standards-based tool for process modeling that supports standards-based notations and templates including Business Process Modeling Notation
If I'm not mistaken, I think that BPMN is NOT used to document the Oracle application business processes...it uses the ARIS de-facto standard EPC for that. And I've written before about my nonplused attitude toward ARIS's weak support for BPMN...maybe they've done something wonderful with it in the Oracle implementation and we'll see that in the product soon.
UPDATE: AMIS Blog has news from a demo of Oracle BPA, which was very informative, including their hierarchical organization of business processes, something I'm struggling with for our own enterprise business process architecture right now: "Oracle BPA recognizes four levels of decomposition: 0=Industry Level or Process Category (SCM, HRM), 1=Business Process (Inventory Management) ,2=Detail Business Process (level of SOA Services), 3=Activity Model (BPEL) and application specific.". I would love to see a demonstration of this product, just to get a look at how they structure their organization of business processes...can anyone get us a demo?
UPDATE 2: Here's an Oracle BPA datasheet (PDF), with too-small graphics, but enough of a view to confirm that they are using the ARIS EPC modeling notation for their business process models. This might make it even more instructional for us building out our BP architecture since we could begin looking at integration with Oracle's standards since we would like to incorporate their HCM process models (supported by their PeopleSoft tool).
Posted by outlawv at December 28, 2006 08:35 AM