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Finally you finished a long and resource consuming BPM project successfully. New processes, new roles and rules were defined. Everything is specified – the processes are defined as they should be performed in the future. But how to avoid, that your process are putted beside in a closet and never watched again?

One solution is - bring the processes to execution. Why not designing software according to your new process, so the users are performing their new defined process automatically?! IDS Scheer is providing different approaches with different products offering a bunch of execution scenarios. The purpose of this article is to give you a glance of these possibilities.

There are three ARIS products on the market which are supporting you with different approaches (all are visualized in the appended picture) to bring your process to execution:

  • ARIS for SAP
  • ARIS SOA Architect
  • ARIS Automation Architect

ARIS to execution overview

ARIS for SAP

For each scenario I assume that you have already modeled your business process. For the ARIS for SAP scenarios you have to model the processes in EPC. This business model is the base for two exchange scenarios.

In scenario one, you are interchanging your process models with SAP Solution Manager (SolMan). Therewith you can either first download process templates from the Solution Manager and modify them or you can enrich your existing processes with the transaction IDs from the SAP system. All models in ARIS can afterwards be transferred to SAP Solution Manager, which generates you the customizing file. This file is needed to configure for example your SAP ECC (Enterprise Core Component) according to the process.

The second possibility addresses the new Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) of SAP. With ARIS for SAP it is possible to enrich your existing processes with services defined in ESR. If there is a service missing, it is also possible to define a new service description in ARIS and upload this description to ESR. A more detailed description on ARIS for SAP and the functionality for ESR was outlined by Uwe in this blog entry. In the future, there are plans to realize an additional function to exchange processes via BPMN 2.0 from ARIS to the SAP world.

ARIS SOA Architect / ARIS Automation Architect

If you are not living in a SAP world, there are other possibilities to bring your process to execution. The starting point of these scenarios is also the business model. Additionally to the business model, you have to derive a technical model which is used as the base of the transformation to the executable description (e.g. BPEL or XPDL). The way to create this technical model and the aspects which have to be considered, are very complex and therefore discussed in one of the upcoming articles. To transform these technical models, you can either use ARIS SOA Architect or ARIS Automation Architect depending on your use case – the requirements of your execution engine.

ARIS SOA Architect is a product dedicated to Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) and comes with an integrated EPC to BPEL transformation. Theoretically, it is possible to transform your business model given as EPC directly to BPEL, but in practice we suggest that you first create a new EPC which is dedicated to the technical details.

If you want to be more flexible you can use ARIS Automation Architect, which is part of ARIS Process Governance. It is a new product from IDS Scheer, which allows you to define model transformations. A common transformation scenario in the field of SOA is the transformation from BPMN to XPDL. The advantage of ARIS Automation Architect is flexibility. You can easily modify the transformation. For example, if you need XPDL for IBM Websphere, you can build in the XPDL flavor of IBM and when you want to use it for webMethods from Software AG – as we all know, everyone is following the standard, but with some own flavors ;-) - you can modify it to be webMethods compliant.

Normally the output of transformations from the technical model to a technical executable description is not directly executable. But it is a very rich description, which can be completed with more technical details in a process development tool such as Oracle’s JDeveloper. The last step in these scenarios is to transfer the executable descriptions from the process development tool to the process engine, where it gets executed.

As you can see, there are many scenarios to bring your business processes from ARIS to execution. And one article cannot cover all steps in detail for each scenario, but give you an overview what’s supported by ARIS. Feel free to contact me for more questions/information or discuss with me the different possibilities in the comments below.

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