WebRatio: the other way to BPM
BPM (Business Process Management) is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance. BPM employs methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to continuously optimize the organization's processes to improve business performance against goals and objectives (this is called BPI: Business Process Improvement).
There are several software tools enabling BPM discipline in a company. The most common ones are the so-called BPMS (Business Process Management Suites). A BPMS is an integrated suite of technologies that work together to support the BPI cycle. Generally, a BPMS is a whole platform offering the following features:
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Business process modelling
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Business process execution/automation
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Data and information management within the process
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Interoperation with external software assets
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Change management
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Business activity monitoring
WebRatio allows to support BPM within your company, but with a different and innovative approach.
The WebRatio approach to BPM: build custom BPM applications
Instead of offering a whole platform comprehensive of all the typical features of a BPMS, WebRatio clearly distinguishes between design-time features and run-time features. At design-time WebRatio offers you a powerful modelling and development environment, allowing you to define all the requirements of your BPM project by capturing them in abstract models and custom components. At run-time, starting from the models, WebRatio generates a standalone custom BPM application that can be easily deployed on any standard Java Application Server.
The development process of a BPM project with WebRatio is highly iterative. We call it “evolutionary prototyping development cycle”. At any stage of your project, even after a few minutes, you can generate the BPM application and test it immediately. In such way you will have an immediate feedback of what you have done and you can react accordingly. This kind of development process allows you to involve (if you want) your business users or your stakeholder in the evaluation of the work in progress.
What are the main differences between WebRatio and BPMS?
We can highlight 4 main differences between WebRatio and “traditional” BPMS:
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Build a real tailored solution instead of customizing a predefined platform
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Two layers of modelling, instead of one
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Rapid evolutionary prototyping, instead of a waterfall development
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Run in a standard Java environment, instead of having a proprietary runtime engine
The differences between WebRatio and traditional BPMS can bring you many benefits:
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Speed in building the solution |
With 2 modeling layers, you can increase the productivity even more and reduce the time to market of the BPM application in your company. You and your team will be just required to define the model; WebRatio will take care of the rest. |
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User Acceptance |
By extensively using prototyping, you can involve business users in the development process of the BPM application; you can show them early on the current status of the work and collect their feedback earlier. Business users will never be disappointed. |
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Quality of the solution |
At the end of the project you get a perfectly tailored application in terms of functions, user experience, visual identity and integration with other web applications of your WOA (Web Oriented Architecture), running and adapting to your SOA. Business users will never part with particular wanted features. Furthermore, the automatically generated code will be free of human errors. |
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Standard execution environment |
If your company has strict IT policies for the execution, maintenance, and lifecycle management of applications, no need to worry. The application you get is perfectly compliant to JEE standards, the source code of the application is open, you can choose your execution environment from the most common Java Application Servers. No vendor lock-in syndrome. |
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