Join the Pieces to Build Processes

by Penny Lunt

For companies that have large numbers of Web services and components that need to be managed, assembled and orchestrated into larger processes and applications, Q-Link 5.0 from Q-Link Technologies (www.qlinktech.com), Los Angeles, offers a business process management (BPM) framework that is well suited to the task.

Its abstraction layer lets developers assemble applications based on business constructs rather than requiring them to write Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) code. The software provides BPM components such as workflow, user interface design, business rules and persistent data, with an open architecture based on J2EE, Xforms and Xpath.

Q-Link 5.0 comes with 20 prebuilt Process Action Components (Q-PACs) that perform a number of common BPM functions, including "route to person," "route to manager," "send email," "execute Web service" and "perform an SQL query." Q-Link partner iWay (www.iwaysoftware.com), New York, has built more than 200 additional Q-PACs that support integration with major ERP and CRM applications including SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel, as well as BizTalk and mainframe adapters.

According to Q-Link, anything written in Java can be encapsulated as a Q-PAC, so customers can build their own components. For each Q-PAC, the designer generates a dialog to configure parameters, such as the required skill level of the person to be assigned a piece of work, the form/user interface that person will be presented with and any special instructions for the task. There might be an associated estimated time and/or estimated cost as well as escalation rules specified in the dialog. The dialog can also apply to strictly system-to-system processes. For example, the dialog in Q-Link's prebuilt "execute a Web service" Q-PAC can query UDDI repositories and find a particular Web service to run — a useful feature for companies that store Web services in more than one directory.

Large-scale business processes can be constructed by customizing and dragging and dropping Q-PACs (which appear as icons at the top of the screen) onto the Q-Link Process Application Designer.

"If a process requires a Web interface and needs workflow on the back end, then we can use Q-Link to build it," says Dharmesh Patel, senior software engineer at Co-Advantage Resources, a human resources administration outsourcing firm based in Orlando, FL. The firm has already built 75 new business processes using existing Q-PACs and a custom-built FTP file transfer Q-PAC created in-house with coaching from Q-Link.

Co-Advantage invested in Q-Link to automate processes, to capture information in digital format and to closely integrate processes across departments. For example, certain processes affect both the payroll department that serves customers and the internal accounting department. New Q-Link processes streamline that work so that tasks are handled in a linear fashion. Another new process has been created for handling IT help tickets. In this case, the company recreated an existing home-grown help ticket system within Q-Link.

Patel recently built a mini CRM application in Q-Link. This application lets representatives pull up the history of each customer who calls in so they can see the account status and unclosed issues, and then make updates and send email notifications. To do this, Patel needed to link Q-Link to an existing customer database. He customized the look and feel of the application by adding new Web pages.

Any time a Co-Advantage business manager sees a need to automate, he or she works with internal software engineers to describe the process and the desired flow. If appropriate, business and IT people work together to construct the new process. Patel says it's not always easy to determine which processes are worth automating and which are not. Typically, he says, processes get automated if a manager could use the resulting reports or if the process runs across more than one department. At any given time, the IT department is working on a handful of new processes — usually heavily automated processes that require some human interaction.

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