Routes of Adoption: Process Automation

As the number of instances of your process increase, it is difficult to scale the process economically by just adding more people. Here, we begin to integrate processes across applications and systems and to automate the execution of groups of steps to increase speed and efficiency, as well as to reduce manual work and repetitive labor. This is called Process Automation.

Automating business processes requires connecting diverse systems both within and across organizations. Once integration and automation is achieved, visibility into business processes is possible.

Some of the benefits of automating and integrating business processes across systems include:

• Connecting people, processes, and systems
• Enabling business processes that span multiple systems
• Realizing the benefits of scaling with current investments
• Increasing cross-functional process visibility

BizTalk Server connects legacy and line of business applications that reside on different platforms. In order to connect and effectively communicate with applications that support functions such as purchase ordering, invoicing and a number of other critical business practices, BizTalk supports a wide variety of different communication languages (including both standards-based protocols and industry- or application-specific formats) through the use of powerful integration adapters. In addition to ensuring accurate and complete communication between applications, BizTalk serves to route messages to the correct destination based on user-defined conditions (such as the type of application, or if a message meets a certain threshold requirement, as may be appropriate with financial messaging). BizTalk Server implements “publish and subscribe” messaging to loosely couple source and destination systems.

Additionally, BizTalk Server supports the graphical creation of business processes, rather than using the slower, inflexible and less intuitive approach of using a programming language. Business process modeling in BizTalk supports the visualization of the steps in the process; the analysis of bottlenecks, gaps and weak links; collaboration across cross-functional workgroups to come to a common understanding of process issues; and rolling out process changes and improvements. Business users can achieve these goals by creating business process maps (say of the flow of invoicing documents across the organization) in Visio and then handing these off to developers for implementation using tools exposed through Visual Studio. Once a business process is defined and the steps automated in a composite application, BizTalk provides business users with the tools to change the business rules that underlie the process. Such tools enable users to both optimize processes and to respond rapidly and agilely as business needs change.