Integration-Centric BPM

Integration-Centric BPM refers to the business process management (BPM) activities with the integration of company-wide information system as the center. It aims at the association and strengthening of a variety of information systems. While HC BPM (Human-Centric BPM) focuses on the personnel management and the information exchange with people, IC BPM emphasizes controlling the different information systems and the information exchange between different information systems. It is also known as IC BPM or IC-BPM.

Overview of Integration-Centric BPM
IC BPM (Integration-Centric Business Process Management) refers to the improvement management activities by controlling the following aspects:
 * The scenario and process where the different company information systems should be utilized;
 * The data contents which should be transferred to different company information systems;
 * The data contents which should be returned by different company information systems;
 * The different company information systems and their functionalities

Among the business process management activities, it focuses on the configuration of information systems and communication control between different information systems.

The concept of SOA is introduced to the current company information system by communicating both the input data and output data in the form of XML texts. The Web services provided by different systems are centrally controlled by the BPM System so as to enhance the tie-up among them.

For example, when a normal consumer places an order on the EC Site, the processes can automatically start, automatically proceed and almost automatically end if the bunch of information systems is optimally integrated such as EC Site, credit card verification Web service, inventory management system, shipping & packaging system, delivery consignment system and delivery status management system. The promotion of IC-BPM, may greatly reduce the cost on a large scale.

In addition, the system incorporating the design graphic tool and the analytic tool for performance results is referred to as BPM Suite. Though it is similar to the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system aiming at integrating the enterprise resources, it focuses more on the process optimization (process modification simulation, trial process modification and so on) with the development of SOA.

Integration
Originally, Integration means coordination without isolation and the System Integration (SI) is well known in IT business. The word System itself means that the whole organization is working organically such as the system kitchen, social securities system and transportation system. On the other hand, SI refers to the fact that the system elements are organically associated such as the telecommunication network, hardware, software and data. Moreover, the companies which are entrusted for SI by the company clients are called SIers.

Orchestration
The term Orchestration refers to summarization of the Web services provided by a variety of information systems as one whole process. There are a lot of cases where the internal procedures are described based on BPEL which is approved by OASIS as a standard.

In addition, the described procedures are understood by the Workflow Engine and the status can be kept under control real time as per the process instance.

IC-BPM Suite Vendor
※ The companies above are listed randomly.

Related Articles

 * BPM
 * Human-Centric BPM
 * BPMS
 * SOA
 * ERP
 * BPEL
 * OASIS
 * Workflow Engine
 * Process instance
 * XPDL
 * EAI