ActiveVOS Designer includes plugins
for Business Process Modeling and Simulation, providing business users and
technologists a common interface for depicting, describing, and automating
business processes. It combines the advantages of a flow-charting (modeling)
tool and a word processing program with technology that allows information
systems to easily integrate business process information with existing
Internet-compliant technologies.
A business user can use ActiveVOS
Designer for Business Analysts to diagram business processes and document
related goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), deliverables, dependencies,
and other information. The technologist can use ActiveVOS Designer to transform
those diagrams and explanations into an executable software using open standard
BPEL and Web
Services. The process can also work the other way: the IT person can give a
business analyst access to an existing process and the business analyst can use
ActiveVOS Designer or ActiveVOS Designer for Business Analysts to transform it
into a BPMN model to review or enrich the metadata describing the model.
Components
The ActiveVOS business process
modeling interface includes four main
working areas, called views.
§
The Editor
view is the area in which you create and modify diagrams (flow charts),
referred to as models. It includes a Palette
of drawing objects that represent business processes and decision points. Those
objects can include additional data that identify their purpose within the
process. The menus in the Palette are “stacked”—the context-menu items are
included in the Palette choices.
§
The Properties
view is the area where you can add information to enrich the diagram. Some of
the information will not be visible in the diagram; for example, descriptions,
goals, KPIs, etc. Some of the information will be visible in the diagram; for
example, names, gateway exclusivity, etc.
§
The Outline
view provides a “tree” view, with icons that represent different types of
elements.
§
The Artifacts
view allows you to import and integrate into your model pre-existing elements
from other BPMN-compliant software.
Whether those views appear and how
they are organized is further determined by Perspectives.
Using the information in the
model, ActiveVOS can also simulate
how changes to the business process would affect process bottlenecks, staffing,
productivity rates, or other indicators described by the model.
Benefits
You can continue modeling and
documenting business processes much as you may have in the past, but doing so
within the framework of ActiveVOS provides far-reaching benefits to your
organization. You can import Visio drawings and incorporate Microsoft Word
documents as documentation for the models. You can design a process model from
the ground-up, or reverse engineer an existing BPEL process into a BPMN model
with the click of a button.
With ActiveVOS Designer,
you can also import models of the following types: Rose, UML2, and XPDL.
ActiveVOS provides a completely
standards-based approach to both documenting and implementing business
processes. Business analysts can design,
document and simulate processes using the BPMN 1.0 standard, and the model can
be transformed into either BPEL4WS 1.1 or WS-BPEL 2.0 for execution.
The reporting capabilities combine
the models you create and their descriptions into a format that can be easily
understood by management, as well as IT. The technologists in your organization
will benefit from being able to take your diagrams and easily transform them
into executable processes.
To experience ActiveVOS business
process modeling features, follow the tutorial; Creating a BPMN model from a BPEL artifact.
See
also: