Pega

Introduction PegaRULES Process Commander
Copyright 2006 Pegasystems Inc., Cambridge, MA

All rights reserved. This document describes products and services of Pegasystems Inc. It may contain trade secrets and proprietary information. The document and product are protected by copyright and distributed under licenses restricting their use, copying distribution, or transmittal in any form without prior written authorization of Pegasystems Inc. This document is current as of the date of publication only. Changes in the document may be made from time to time at the discretion of Pegasystems. This document remains the property of Pegasystems and must be returned to it upon request. This document does not imply any commitment to offer or deliver the products or services described. This document may include references to Pegasystems product features that have not been licensed by your company. If you have questions about whether a particular capability is included in your installation, please consult your Pegasystems service consultant. For Pegasystems trademarks and registered trademarks, all rights reserved. Other brand or product names are trademarks of their respective holders.
This document is the property of: Pegasystems Inc. 101 Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142-1590 (617) 374-9600, fax: (617) 374-9620 www.pega.com PegaRULES Process Commander Document: Introduction Software Version 4.02 Print Date: March 2006 Order #: @DPCINTRO07
Contents
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite.............................................................................................1-1 Making Continuous Improvement a Reality......................................................................1-2 Comprehensive SmartBPM Suite..............................................................................1-2 Smart Business Process Management ............................................................................1-6 Delivering the SmartBPM Difference................................................................................1-8 Building for Change........................................................................................................1-11 Easy-to-Use Portal ..................................................................................................1-12 Building Localized Applications for Global Use .......................................................1-17 SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise.................................................................1-18 Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) ......................................................................1-18 Commitment to Open Architecture ..........................................................................1-20 Commitment to Standards.......................................................................................1-21 Why Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite? ............................................................................1-22 SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion .........................................................................2-1 Receiving..........................................................................................................................2-4 Routing.............................................................................................................................2-6 Routing Work to Worklists and Workbaskets ............................................................2-8 Reporting and Business Activity Monitoring ...................................................................2-13 Business Process Analysis .....................................................................................2-17 Researching ...................................................................................................................2-19 Responding ....................................................................................................................2-21 Responding to Customer and Partner Service Level Agreements ..........................2-22 Resolving........................................................................................................................2-24 The Underlying Difference..............................................................................................2-27 Building for Change and Productivity .................................................................................3-1 Rules-Based BPM Change and Productivity ...............................................................3-2 Development and Management Productivity.............................................................3-2 Flexibility and Power .................................................................................................3-4 Comprehensive Support for Complete BPM Lifecycle .....................................................3-6 Application Evolution and Management ....................................................................3-7 Integrated Development Environment..............................................................................3-8 Process Commander Environment and Job Functions .............................................3-8 Easy to Develop, Deploy, and Manage Processes and Rules ..................................3-9
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Contents
Building for Change Developer Productivity .......................................................3-11 Robust Version Management..................................................................................3-22 Rules-Driven Localization...............................................................................................3-24 The Right Process or Business Rule at the Right Time .................................................3-26 Building for Change Flexibility and Agility ..................................................................3-28 Leveraging Enterprise Architecture ....................................................................................4-1 PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture Patterns................................................4-2 PegaRULES Process Commander Integration Services..................................................4-6 Security for Enterprise Requirements...............................................................................4-7 Built for Scale, Performance, and Resiliency ...................................................................4-9 Conclusion......................................................................................................................4-13 Glossary ................................................................................................................................A-1 Contacting Pegasystems.....................................................................................................B-1 Customer Support ........................................................................................................... B-2 Education Services.......................................................................................................... B-2 Documentation Feedback ............................................................................................... B-3 Office Locations............................................................................................................... B-4 Index ..........................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1 Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

PegaRULES Process Commander is the latest generation of the Pegasystems business process management (BPM) solution built on the PegaRULES foundation. PegaRULES Process Commander is the only business process management system that combines a patented enterprise rules engine with tools for developing, executing, and evolving enterprise-wide business applications. PegaRULES Process Commander is a central component of the Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite TM. Pegasystems radically improves the way you do business. Its SmartBPM Suite helps you to deliver on customer commitments, empower your people, automate processes, introduce responsiveness, and instill a spirit of continuous improvement in your organization. Pegasystems has been building rules engines that drive business processes since 1983. As the market leader in rules-driven process automation, Pegasystems has built solutions for distributed global enterprises across many industries including retail, manufacturing, travel and hospitality, as well as sophisticated financial services and health care organizations. Working with leading partners, Pegasystems delivers pragmatic solutions to enhance the productivity, quality, agility, and compliance of your business.
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Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite
Making Continuous Improvement a Reality

Smart organizations know they need to find intelligent ways to address ongoing challenges: constantly changing competition, new requirements for governance compliance, shifting market conditions, a global economy, and distributed operations. Each group within the larger organization has significant tasks: Executives set goals and evaluate how continuous improvement can help reach new levels of customer service, loyalty, and profitability. Departmental leaders are asked to execute these goals day to day, gathering best practices, driving specific processes to completion. IT must support these solutions and offer to executives views of key performance measures, deliver quick wins through process automation, maintain existing systems, and better leverage the Web.
Pegasystems brings these three groups together with its SmartBPM Suite, a new category of process management software. SmartBPM puts people first, empowering and learning from them while automating systems and processes. SmartBPM digitizes best practices, stores them in a common PegaRULES database, and constantly refines them. It is the engine that drives goal-driven tasks to completion, helping businesses meet todays challenges and thrive and succeed because of the challenges.
Comprehensive SmartBPM Suite

The latest generation of Pegasystems industry leading, rules-driven BPM is a comprehensive suite, intended to help businesses plan, build, and manage process 1 management solutions through their entire lifecycle. Without the ability to model, simulate, execute, monitor, and analyze results, you will not be able to perform the full cycle of BPM. Additionally, if you cannot blend your process and practice rules to rapidly deploy and update solutions in response to changing circumstances, you do not have SmartBPM.
Some suite components are extra options and are licensed separately.
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Making Continuous Improvement a Reality
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With the Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite, built on a patented rules engine, you have facilities for the complete BPM lifecycle (Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1. Continuous Improvement with the SmartBPM Solution Lifecycle PegaRULESTM: A patented business rules engine (BRE) that enables even the largest enterprises to capture, execute, and manage their business rules. At the heart of the suite, PegaRULES provides dynamic rule resolution and drives work to completion with automation. PegaRULES Process Commander: A highly graphical and rapid solution development environment, execution engine, and management dashboard all in one. Process Commander helps you to plan, design, manage, and evolve decision-intensive process management solutions quickly and thoroughly:
Model: Analysts design and model process flows visually. Analysts can see at a glance where they are and can quickly navigate to where they need to go. They are guided through the process modelling stage with intuitive graphical forms that also act as a powerful navigator. Analysts and developers can drill down to the deepest levels of the solution without compromising the at-a-glance view perferred by business owners.
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Build: Business users can safely and continuously update their specific processes and business rules applied at any stage. With more than 90 predefined rule forms, developers can outperform manual Java-coding severalfold. As a result, solutions are built, piloted, and tested quickly to keep up with the business. Execute: Pegasystems addresses the critical gulf between goals and execution with built-in execution. Tasks, automated procedures, enterprise messaging, assignments, and deadline-triggered alerts all work together to reclaim time and cost. Monitor: Managers can constantly survey how their people, systems, and processes are performing at any point. Managers can escalate issues, identify critical bottlenecks, and anticipate peakloads.
Process Analyzer: Builds a data warehouse of both historic work data and statistical data, with online analytic tools to continuously improve processes. Managers can look at organization workflow, queue load, cycle time, and performance. With more than a dozen specialized Microsoft Excel templates, analysts can mine for data, slice, dice, and tune assumptions to support new goal objectives. Process Simulator: New business processes are simulated before they go live, Analysts can quantify and compare potential for increased service levels as well as time, error, and cost reductions. Flows and bottlenecks are depicted with animations that show high traffic flows, color-coded numerical counts, overall statistics and cost metrics as well as total time to process work. Enterprise Integration: Pegasystems firm commitment to industry standards has led to a growing and extensive library of enterprise connectors and adaptors. SmartBPM provides services that span multiple systems across and between enterprises. Portal Integration: Businesses turn to the Web to enable collaboration with their trading partners, open up self-service to their customers, improve exception reporting and tracking. Now they can include Pegasystems SmartBPM solutions within their industry-standard portal, or even permit another application to subscribe to a SmartBPM process as a service.
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Making Continuous Improvement a Reality
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Content Management Integration: Collections of images, documents, files, e-mail and correspondence all play an important role in business process management. The SmartBPM Suite can also integrate image repositories, and document and content management systems to manage global policies and processes for record retreival and retention. Case Management: A smart case management application, included as a part of the SmartBPM Suite, can be put to work immediately. Cases can include images, documents, faxes, and various forms of rich media. Issue-oriented projects get off to a fast start with multiple tasks linked together events and schedules, invitations and alerts issued, meetings announced and tracked pushed to completion until case issues are closed.
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Smart Business Process Management

The application of rules addresses the challenges of coming to the right decision and then doing and completing the work. PegaRULES drives work to completion through its ability to select the right rule, to research and grab as needed the right data, images, and facts based on key factors such as who, what, when, where, and why. In addition, PegaRULES supports both forward and backward chaining to automatically detect and prompt for missing data as part of the business process, simplifying development and reducing the need for manual exception handling (Figure 1-2). Any business process has these key components: Process Workflow used to transition work from one step to the next Practice Decisions used to complete the work and to manage exceptions
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite integrates the simplicity of process flow design with the power of automated decision making delivered by its business rules engine, PegaRULES. Process Commander provides a BPM engine and business rules engine (BRE) in a common solution, enabling enterprises to: Respond to both process and practice challenges and changes Deal with complex decisions Handle system-to-system, system-to-human, and human-to-human interactions across the distributed enterprise Make extensive use of Web services, including support for business-to-business integration
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Smart Business Process Management
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Process Commander is the ideal solution for global, distributed companies that are striving to increase revenue growth, customer satisfaction, eBusiness activities and, of course, speed time to market for new products. Process Commander is also ideal for organizations that have limited IT resources but need to increase enterprise productivity, service level quality, and business agility. In addition, managing strategies to comply with evolving industry and government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, and HIPAA can also be significantly easier with Process Commander.
Figure 1-2. PegaRULES Enterprise Rules Engine Selects the Right Rule
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Delivering the SmartBPM Difference

Process Commander brings the world of the business executive, work manager, process consultant, and information specialist together to eliminate the gap between goals and execution despite the increasing speed of business change. Process Commander is designed to allow them all to achieve common goals: planning the best process, making ongoing process improvements, and driving work to completion through automation. Process Commander eliminates the gap between goals and execution by combining process rules that move work with business practice rules that complete work. Process Commander addresses all your requirements for process management: not only to receive, route, and report, but also to research, respond, and resolve. In driving these Six Rs of work lifecycle management, Process Commander enables significant business agility and ROI: Receive Across roles and functions, your employees can easily capture and control work regardless of the source from Web services, e-mail, fax, imaging, call centers, or browsers (Figure 1-3). Clean, simple forms enhance productivity.
Figure 1-3. Receiving Work Clean, Simple Forms Enhance Productivity
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Delivering the SmartBPM Difference
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Route Ensure optimal work management with rules-based delivery of work to the right person or system based on skills, roles, urgency, or structure so that work is done properly and efficiently (Figure 1-4).
Figure 1-4. Defining Routing with Microsoft Visio and Business Rules Report Business managers can monitor processes with extensive built-in reporting facilities. Graphical and textual tools provide Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) through an open relational database as well as statistical sampling capabilities (Figure 1-5). Robust OLAP tools are also available as part of Process Analyzer for analysis of historical and statistical data.
Figure 1-5. Process Commander Report and Drill-Down Capability
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Research Using the system and the power of a business rules engine to obtain information automatically (as needed), business workers get the right data from the best sources just in time to drive the work. Respond Leverage the power of automation across channels, including customers and partners, to make responses personal and specific to the situation, according to the rules defined by management. Resolve Automate critical business decisions without human interaction and with higher quality to complete work quickly. Business workers can use decision tables to speed work when human intervention is required (Figure 1-6).
Figure 1-6. Decision Table Speeds Resolution
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Building for Change
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Building for Change

The fundamental principles of Process Commander solution design and development include speed, flexibility, iteration, and reuse building for change and rapid solution delivery. These principles apply whether the goal is to integrate with an existing transaction system, deploy a standalone BPM solution, or change a BPM application that is already in production. Process Commander includes these features: Intuitive browser interface Access to all development and application functions, including built-in work forms, enabling quicker deployment and reduced user training costs. Common PegaRULES database Rules supporting a Process Commander system, usually stored in one or more relational databases. The shared database makes it easy to develop, deploy, and manage processes and rules across the enterprise. Rule specialization Dynamically selecting and assembling the most appropriate (specialized) rule or process at run time. Using its patented rules engine, Process Commander speeds application customization and deployment. Embedded Microsoft Visio Easy-to-use graphical front end to the PegaRULES database, enabling users to design the processes and business rules in one integrated step. Friendly fit-for purpose forms Design simplicity that business users will understand. Built-in versioning of processes and rules Facilities for fast, easy changes (including rollback), and deployment to production in real time. Comprehensive administrative and development resources Tools that help ensure that systems and processes run efficiently.
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Easy-to-Use Portal
Your business runs more smoothly when users across functions share a familiar, easy-to-use, common environment. For business users, developers, and system administrators, the Process Commander Portal provides the benefits of a browserbased, highly usable, unified client for all users, with enhancements appropriate for user role and tasks (Figure 1-7):
Current Task Expandable Sections
Clean layout with color-coding to highlight the current task Logical navigation for todays browser-fluent users Expandable navigation bars for task selection Expandable workspace for context control
Navigation Panel
Context-Sensitive Workspace
Expandable Bars
Figure 1-7. Web-Based Process Commander Portal for Ease of Use
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Easy Design Environment Ideal for Business Analysts and Process Architects
With ease of use and adaptability, Process Commander empowers business users business analysts and process architects to automate and change their processes and practices to respond to changing business needs. Process Commander leverages its patented rules engine to enable users to manage complex business processes, including those with a large number of exceptions, or those for which tasks, subtasks, and decisions are delegated to many individuals across and even beyond the enterprise. Process change is efficient with Microsoft Visio, embedded into the Process Commander Portal (Figure 1-8). Working from Visio shapes and intuitive forms and property boxes, business analysts and process architects can change process components such as routing, integration, and decisions. For example, business analysts can diagram an entire business process by using Microsoft Visio. Each step in the diagram is automatically written to the PegaRULES database, defining processes, assignments, decisions, and other steps without explicit programming in Java. Swim lane process rules enable business analysts to model multiple, independent channels that organize flows visually into a process context. With this capability, business analysts can keep business processes current with minimal support. Delegating process management and change to business analysts is possible because the entire process including complex business rules is defined in one common system using one set of common tools. Because Visio is commonly used, it makes it easier for users to become familiar with Pegasystems. In addition, users can also import existing Visio Process flows into Process Commander to accelerate the start of project development.
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Figure 1-8. Process Commander Portal with Designer Layout and Visio for Process Architects
Powerful Design Environment Ideal for Developers

With Process Commander, your organization gains an easy-to-use unified developer environment enabling IT staff to change applications and move them into production with speed: Embedded Microsoft Visio provides a front end to the PegaRULES database, enabling developers to implement the right processes and rule at each step in real time (Figure 1-8). Import and leveraging of your existing Visio diagrams streamlines process harvesting. Business users can leverage familiar Visio flows. In addition, these imported flow shapes can use the full power of the Process Commander rules engine.
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Drag-and-drop user interface creation decreases development time and empowers less technical users to evolve rule-based user interfaces. Autogenerated HTML instantly creates a field on the new form (Figure 1-9). Graphical process rule navigation guides developers to access the right process rules quickly and easily. With a mouse click, developers can view and access rules and associated flow actions. Declarative network analysis graphically shows the business rule network dependency, providing a dashboard to test and debug interrelated rules. Tools for tracing, debugging, transaction history, and performance management ensure systems and processes are running efficiently.
Figure 1-9. Drag-and-Drop interface Creation Speeds Development Time
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Object-Oriented Development Environment Ideal for Fast Changes

Process Commander has an object-oriented development environment with a hierarchically structured PegaRULES database model that provides the power to apply the right business rule at the right time. The rule structure delivers flexibility and customization capabilities as well as rapid application configuration, modification, and deployment. Process Commander can run on distributed and multiplatform servers, pulling rules from the PegaRULES database during processing. To support both flexibility and performance in processing, the rules engine first dynamically selects and then assembles the correct rules into Java. The common enterprise PegaRULES database makes distributed rule execution possible, with the ability to provide local performance over distributed physical machines. Built-in version capabilities for processes and rules allow fast, easy changes to production systems, in real time, including rollback to a previous version. You can easily make changes in production, save the modified rules to a new RuleSet version, and test them with a few users. Once production processes and rules work as expected, you can make the new version available to the entire user population. For more information on the application development environment and management tools, see Chapter 3.
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Building Localized Applications for Global Use

Businesses require the flexibility to work across languages, countries, and cultures with world-ready business solutions. Localized applications are suitable for use in one or more specific locales (languages, countries, and cultures). Building these applications efficiently and effectively requires a specialized approach. Process Commander provides significant power and flexibility for enterprises that want to deliver localized BPM applications, allowing individuals around the world to access and benefit from a common set of process and business rules. Process Commander leverages both industry standards and its ability to select rules dynamically to drive the presentation of locale-dependent information: Process Commander stores work-related data in Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16), a universal scheme for handling text in all character sets, allowing for easy and efficient presentation of common data in many languages. A users locale is automatically detected based on browser settings, or a user can select a different locale on the fly. Industry-standard Java libraries (International Components for Unicode, or ICU) present currency, dates, time, and other information in the appropriate format for the specified locale. Date and calendar controls are displayed appropriately for each users locale, while a shared localized business calendar establishes customary work schedules for use in business day calculations. By using RuleSets, locale-specific forms and help are presented only as required. While each application has a designated default (or base) currency for ease and consistency of management, work objects can readily accommodate multiple values of different currencies. Built-in formatting and conversion features simplify presentation and processing.
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SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise

Process Commander is well suited for organizations that view business rules as assets and want to leverage them across the enterprise. While other BPM offerings may work for departmental and point solutions, the Process Commander distributed architecture is ideal for organizations with many business processes requiring automation, including processes that extend across and beyond the enterprise to external suppliers, trading partners, and customers. With its easy-to-use thin-client interface, Process Commander enables IT to maintain control of the technical architecture while providing business users with the flexibility to develop and change processes to meet business conditions.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Process Commander has a sophisticated service-oriented architecture (SOA) that provides one-step Web service setup and integration. For example, a flow can involve activities that are processed as remote Web services (Figure 1-10). Based on the use of simple forms and accelerators to provide integration services to external systems, a developer can quickly configure and deploy standard services, for example, to generate a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file that suppliers, partners, and customers can use. With Process Commander, suppliers, partners, and customers reap the benefits of automation for a substantial return on investment with an increase in productivity, quality, and business agility, and a significant reduction in cost and operational risk. Process Commander enables organizations to leverage enterprise best practices to achieve the benefits of consistency and repeatability. In addition, automated decision capabilities reduce risk and increase responsiveness. Process Commander, powered by rules, empowers business people to build for change.
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise
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Figure 1-10. Service-Oriented Architecture Service Rules Accelerators for Fast Integration
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Commitment to Open Architecture

The Process Commander open architecture runs on multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Linux, IBM z/OS, and AIX, and uses leading applications servers including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and Apache Tomcat. In Process Commander, all rules reside in a common PegaRULES database (or databases) that can run on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 Universal Database. This combination of a distributed server architecture and centralized PegaRULES database operating in heterogeneous environments provides the scalability and reliability for mission-critical applications (Figure 1-11).
Figure 1-11. PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture
Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise
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Commitment to Standards
The Process Commander architecture supports a range of industry-standard technologies and protocols for enterprise integration. Consequently, Process Commander solutions are built to complement, not replace, other systems and technologies that are in use in managing your business: The component-based, open architecture seamlessly integrates Web services and Java, including JSP tags, JDBC connection pooling, and activation/passivation EJB. Easy-to-use accelerators streamline integration with IBM WebSphere MQ, Microsoft .NET, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) SOAP, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), e-mail, and other common service technologies. Compliance with the JSR 168 Portlet Specification enables integration of Process Commander solutions into your corporate portal infrastructure. Compliance with the JSR 94 interface and JSR 168 portlet services enable PegaRULES Process Commander capabilities to be embedded in other systems.
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Why Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite?

SmartBPM applies the power of a business rules engine to business processes, addressing all your requirements for process management. Process Commander drives the Six Rs of work lifecycle management receive, route, report, research, respond, and resolve enabling significant ROI. Achieving increased productivity, quality, agility, and compliance with Process Commander will reduce operation costs, increase revenue, manage risk effectively, and enhance customer loyalty all critical to empowering your organization and maintaining your competitive edge. Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite integrates the simplicity of process flow with the power of automated decision making thanks to its patented rules engine. With its experience in working with innovative organizations, Pegasystems has helped many companies across different industries begin the continuous improvement process. Most start by planning strategically, but beginning tactically, encouraging and funding the larger initiative through early wins and reduced costs tied to a focused SmartBPM project. As the solution continues to grow, improve, and adapt, so too does the companys ability to respond to changing, competitive, business needs.
Chapter 2 SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

Pegasystems provides software to manage complex, changing business processes processes such as credit card disputes, healthcare member enrollment, and insurance underwriting. Pegasystems software makes systems easy for business people and IT departments to use and change. This new class of business management software can automate policy manuals, implement system specifications, and eliminate lines of manual coding using simple forms and Visio to drive real-time Java updates. The worlds most sophisticated organizations companies such as international banks and global manufacturers use Pegasystems solutions to beat their competition and save money on everything from customer service to global tax management. With PegaRULES Process Commander, Pegasystems provides the traditional BPM capabilities receiving, routing, and reporting on work across the enterprise, accomplishing these tasks automatically based on intent-driven rules and processes:
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Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion
Receiving and controlling work regardless of the source or channel Routing work based on worker skills and workload, and SLA-based priorities Reporting and simulation based on historical, not just models
Process Commander completes work by researching, responding, and resolving, thereby eliminating most manual processing for completing work. Researching by rules-driven data and image gathering Responding automatically via multiple communication channels Resolving by automating critical business decisions
Unique to Pegasystems, Process Commander is the only BPM solution that automates both the business decisions and processes that drive decisions, with intentdriven rules and processes. Built on the PegaRULES enterprise rules engine, Process Commander employs a sophisticated common object model to deliver the power of process and practice integration without the expense and resources associated with maintaining separate business process and rules development environment, databases, user interfaces, test environments, and production environments. Process Commander enables your enterprise to combine process rules to move work with business decision rules to complete work, reducing costs, improving productivity, enhancing customer satisfaction, and delivering increased return on investment (ROI). With the Six Rs, Process Commander addresses these essential user requirements to deliver SmartBPM in a single Business Process Management Suite Figure 2-1.
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Receiving
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Figure 2-1. SmartBPM Six Rs Drive Work to Completion
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Receiving
Receiving refers to the ability to accept work item information from multiple sources human and system as well as to create new work. Process Commander is designed with the broad ability to accept input out of the box, to receive work items from many different channels: employees through a browser, customers via Web self-service, call centers, legacy systems, PDA, fax, e-mail, other interfaces to external systems, and manual input. Process Commander includes many industry-standard integration facilities to receive work from an organizations existing business systems. Most other BPM products are channel-specific and not designed for enterprise use. However, Process Commander is unique in the capability to be called as a service across communication channels. As a result, the product is designed to operate in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), where processes can be easily leveraged and re-used across the enterprise. Furthermore, Process Commander includes east-to-use forms, oriented for business users, making it easy to develop, deploy, and manage processes and rules. These ready-to-run HTML forms are optimized for usability and visual appeal to speed application development and user productivity (Figure 2-2). Easy-to-modify HTML forms support multiple variations of work items, allowing customization for user and application need. Examples include: New Work form Supports initial entry (creation) of a work item by a user. Perform form Supports and guides users in completing a work assignment. Review form Displays the work items in display mode only. Confirm form Accepts a text note explaining a users reasoning about a completed task.
Process Commander forms have a clean, simple layout and are designed for easy navigation. Sections of each form have selection boxes to guide work and decisions. Text boxes can include user notes. In addition, to help users track progress, work
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Receiving
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item forms can display time estimates for the completion of work. Users can also access context- and application-specific help topics and prompts to speed their work.
Figure 2-2. Receiving Work Easy-to-Use Interface
Standard Technologies for Receiving Work

Process Commander uses standard component technologies to accept new work from external systems, and for users to enter work manually. Web services based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages are the emerging preferred approach to building components. Process Commander can respond to SOAP requests as one approach to receiving work. In addition, other industry standard technologies can be used to convey work to a Process Commander application: Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) IBM WebSphere MQ messaging Incoming e-mail messages Java Message Services (JMS) Imported files
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Routing
Routing ensures that work goes to the right person or system, based on skills, roles, availability, urgency, or structure including resource availability monitoring and execution so that work is done properly and efficiently. Unlike competing BPM solutions, Process Commander evaluates incoming work items to ensure optimal work management intelligently assigns items to qualified work queues, and manages the priority of each in terms of importance. Dynamic management of work prioritization along with service level agreements ensures that the more important work is done first. If Process Commander detects a conflict in completing a work item, the system can act as follows: Use decision rules to reassign the work to a qualified work queue based on skills, roles, urgency, and service level agreements. Use specialized processes to meet product, regional, customer, date/time, and unique work attributes.
Process Commander has many facilities for routing rules: Routing Rules Direct the destination of a work item to an individual, workbasket or worklist, an alternate destination, or another decision-making rule such as a decision tree, for further processing. Routing can be based on one or more parameters such as roles, skills, urgency, workload, or service level agreements. Flow Rules Manage the steps and assignments involved in driving work towards resolution. Assignment Rules Assign and send work to appropriate individuals or systems, both inside and outside the enterprise. Work Queues Prioritize and monitor the processing of work, ensuring that the most important tasks are completed first. Declarative expression rules Enable automatic assignment of work based on skills and roles
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Routing
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Service level agreements (SLAs) Automate the routing of assignments, to manage work items and assignments based on their importance relative to other work in process
Skill- and Role-Based Routing

Process Commander ensures that work is assigned at the right level based on skills and role, is monitored dynamically to track progress, and can be moved and escalated automatically to accommodate worker availability. Skills are defined and associated with individual users. In the process, skill information is applied to work as work moves through the process. For example, skill-based routing can be used to assign international contracts based on language and experience in international law. Role-based routing might be used to assign approval authority for credit cards to a supervisor. Workers such as estimators can be assigned tasks based on language and skills (Figure 2-3). Unlike other BPM products, Process Commander manages both simple and complex routing rules using one system, thereby easing deployment and testing.
Figure 2-3, Automatically Routing Work to the Right Person, Partner, or System
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Routing Work to Worklists and Workbaskets

To manage work, Process Commander enables automatic work assignments to worklists, workbaskets, and subprocesses that users can view and access based on their role. The assignments require a destination for the work for example, a worklist or workbasket and a mechanism for getting there. Process Commander supports these destinations: Worklist List of assignments for a specific user. Depending on the application, worklists can contain different types of work, for example, to create an account or transfer a balance (Figure 2-4). By clicking on any column heading, users can sort the column contents. The selection box under the status heading can provide additional information. Workbasket Centralized shared pool of assignments from which several users can select items on which to work. Workbaskets can also hold assignments waiting for a trigger event from an external system. External operator or system Destination that is outside Process Commander. Subprocesses Work routed to a subprocess for additional actions; for example, additional approval is required before the work can move to the next process.
Figure 2-4. Worklist with Assignments and Status
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Parallel Work Management

To manage complex work effectively and efficiently, businesses require a solution that can simultaneously process multiple streams of work. Process Commander achieves parallel work management within a flow through several methods (Figure 2-5): Sub-Flow Synchronous flow that suspends the primary flow until a secondary flow is complete. Spinoff-Flow Subprocess called from the parent process. The parent process continues or completes without waiting for the subprocess to complete. Split-ForEach Multiple subprocesses, one executed for each item in parallel. The same process flow is executed for each item; a Join occurs after all the executions are complete. Split-Join Divided work processing, with two or more sub-flows that execute in parallel and later rejoin. Split-Join supports multitasking of work processing at the flow level. One department or business can at its own pace and following its own flows perform its functions for the work item while another department also works on the same item.
Figure 2-5. Parallel Work Management
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These parallel work management capabilities enable users to manage multiple processes to streamline efforts between distributed workforces and outsourced systems throughout the enterprise.
Service Level Agreements

Service level agreements (SLAs) automate process flow, routing assignments, and rule execution based on time. They enable business analysts to define and manage to time/quality metrics tied to Goals, Deadlines, and Late. This three-level structure promotes organizational responsiveness. Goals Desired amount of time from assignment creation to assignment completion, or work item creation to work item resolution. Deadlines Maximum amount of time from assignment creation to assignment completion, or work item creation to work item resolution. Late Notification activity to run, including frequency, when work remains incomplete beyond a deadline. Late events are incremented; an automatic trigger can set further escalation and actions.
The urgency of a work item or assignment defines its importance relative to other work in progress. Urgency levels are controlled manually or automatically with service level agreements. Automatic changes in urgency levels are based on escalation events that are defined for the process. Dynamic, user-friendly forms allow business managers to control service levels and urgency measures to maximize customer satisfaction (Figure 2-6).
Figure 2-6. Service Levels and Goal and Deadline Icons Red clock icon indicates that the work item is nearing or has passed a deadline. Yellow clock icon indicates that the work item is nearing or has passed a specified goal.
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No icon indicates that the work item is within the defined goal time, or it has no specified service level.
Mass Transfer of Work and Assignment Substitution

Organizational changes, vacation, travel, or illness may prompt the transfer of work from one person or department to another. Making such changes in some business applications is difficult. However, Process Commander makes these changes easy with tools to move work by taking action on groups of items for example, approve all purchase orders and allow new work to be temporarily reassigned to others (Figure 2-7). Authorized managers can reassign work, allowing rapid response to changes in schedules. This type of routing helps to speed work resolution with effective resource utilization.
Figure 2-7. Bulk Work Reassignment Check Boxes Showing Work to Be Reassigned
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Reassignments can be based on a decision tree and calendar, or a default that is determined by parameters such as schedule, role, and skills (Figure 2-8). When one worker is unavailable, the system can route new assignments that would usually go to that user to a specified workbasket. The calendar works with date parameters of the assignment and schedule parameters of the worker to be reassigned.
Figure 2-8. Decision Tree to Identify Substitute Worker for Reassignment
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Reporting and Business Activity Monitoring
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Reporting and Business Activity Monitoring

Reporting includes standard reports, open database, and statistical sampling built in. Graphical and textual process monitoring tools provide dynamic Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can provide business managers with real-time as well as historical information to measure and manage business process performance, leading to better return on investment with your BPM system. Process Commander includes a variety of integrated Web-based reports and graphs that can provide real-time information regarding system resources and work processes: Dashboards for BAM showing standard browser-based reports and graphs. Process Commander provides enhanced support of graphical and textual reporting on business processes. Report URLs can link to specified, role-based reports. Graphs can provide information (with drill-down capabilities) on process creation the rate at which work is entered, timeliness by process type, throughput by owner, and other parameters (Figure 2-9).
Figure 2-9. Business Activity Monitoring Dashboard and Reporting
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Extensive standard reports to provide details on the status of open work, productivity by organization or users, and quality statistics. User-friendly wizard for creating custom reports based on workflows (Figure 2-10). The report wizard makes reporting and querying functions more accessible to less technical business professionals.
Figure 2-10. Flow-Driven Report Generator with Point-and-Click Graph Definition Analysis of where work is, where it was, and where it goes next. Secure history and audit trails, to the transaction level, to track compliance with government and corporate regulations.
In addition to the robust report wizard for creating custom reports, Process Commander enables you to export reports to Microsoft Excel, and uses an open database to leverage third-party reporting tools and existing management dashboards.
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For business users Process Commander reports enable assignments to be reviewed by owner, originator, or customer and provide important accountability, quality, and time information. For supervisors and managers Process Commander provides extensive visibility to work in process, work completed, bottlenecks, backlogs, achievement of SLA objectives, and productivity.
Work Quality Management and Reporting

Process Commander actively manages the work in business operations. Every user of the system has a prioritized worklist that highlights goals and deadlines. Using skill-based and role-based routing, Process Commander gets the right work to the right person automatically. These work management and reporting capabilities support process management and continuous improvement. A statistical sampling feature selects a specified subset of work items for quality assurance testing so that management can review whether operators are performing up to expectations. In addition, service levels for automatically escalating work according to business rules for goals, deadlines, and urgency values help control the priority of work. Process Commander incorporates the Six Sigma philosophy to make it easy to see and use measures of productivity and quality. These measures enable organizations to move quickly to meet changing market conditions and demands. Six Sigma has become a leading methodology by which companies manage and improve their business processes. As a leading Business Process Management Suite, Process Commander provides the core capabilities for implementing successful Six Sigma projects: business rules, integration, reporting, simulation, piloting, and activity monitoring. Both Six Sigma and BPM are concerned with continuous improvement, with the implicit notion of change to the process. Six Sigma uses measures to achieve a desired level of defects. For BPM, improvements yield increased ROI measures and/or key performance measures that can be obtained through process data. These
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core complementary differences make it apparent that PegaRULES Process Commander provides an ideal platform to implement Six Sigma projects.
Secure Audit Trail to Support Accountability

Secure history and audit trails (to the transaction level) allow tracking of compliance with government and corporate regulations. Process Commander automatically records the date, time, and user for each step in a process. This audit trail provides details about a modified assignment or work item. Audit trails can include attachments with the added benefit of retaining versions of attached documents. Managers and business analysts can use the history reports to pinpoint sources of delays and errors. Audit trails are also valuable to process architects for monitoring paths taken by work items through process flows to identify process design improvements. The audit trail reports can be customized to give users the flexibility to adapt to individual need (Figure 2-11).
Figure 2-11. Built-In Process Commander Audit Trail for a Work Item
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Business Process Analysis

For most enterprises, the primary objective of agility and change is to increase revenues and reduce costs. Business process analysis (BPA) solutions can help your organization achieve its objectives by identifying bottlenecks and reducing error cycles. BPA technology enables quick analysis of process models and simulation of alternatives to optimize business processes. PegaRULES Process Commander provides a development environment that includes not only the tools to build and execute BPM solutions, but also to simulate and analyze business processes. These optional tools are PegaRULES Process Analyzer and PegaRULES Process Simulator.
Monitor and Analyze

Process Commander extends BAM capabilities with the optional Process Analyzer preconfigured OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes that support analysis of historical Process Commander information. Enterprises typically use this capability to analyze aggregate information for process improvement in four areas: organization workload, queue load, cycle time, and performance. Each of these cubes includes four predefined Excel templates, to provide 16 preconfigured reports. The source of information for all reporting is the Process Commander database, polled on a user-defined timeframe. The information is calculated and displayed within the Process Commander Portal. Change the viewing parameters and the new information redisplays instantly. With the ability to use this OLAP approach, business managers have easy access to essential information for process and quality improvement (Figure 2-12).
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Figure 2-12. Preconfigured OLAP Cubes for Richer Work Analysis
Simulate and Pilot

Simulating rules-driven applications enables you to optimize operations. Process Simulator enables you to simulate an application or changes to an application before it goes into production. Once business analysts are satisfied with the simulation results, the application can go to a subset of users through Process Commanders robust version management. Process Simulator provides these strategic functions: Simulates what-if process and business rule changes in flows based on historical and statistical work data Simulates multiple top-level and sublevel process flows concurrently Visually displays bottlenecks, throughput, and capacity constraints with a graphical animator Graphically monitors flow routes as work progresses through a process flow Provides a range of comparative analytics by integrating with PegaRULES Process Analyzer
For more information, see the PegaRULES Process Simulator User Guide.
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Researching
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Researching
Researching refers to the capability to have the system automatically (and only as needed) employ the power of a business rules engine to request information just in time getting the right data, images, and facts to drive work through to completion. To provide customers with full service that can differentiate your business, you need to apply the power of automation to do research. With Process Commander, the system automatically employs its powerful business rules engine to ask for information, just in time, to drive your work: Identifying missing data needed to automate decisions and processes. Dynamically acquiring data, images, or other elements from other systems as needed. Using backward chaining and dependency networks to automatically detect and prompt for missing data as part of the business process, simplifying development and reducing the need for manual exception handling.
Research occurs when and as needed because of part of the flow: Whether by a person or machine, a decision can be made about research on demand. Smart BPM does smart research by knowing what data is needed to advance or resolve the work, and what is not needed. Both data and computing cycles usually have associated costs. To get needed data, the rules engine enables the use of backward chaining. In research, as with the other Six Rs, SmartBPM is intent-driven to get only the data required. By intelligently acquiring only the data needed to complete work, Process Commander provides an improved ROI based on reduced system overhead, lower network traffic, and the elimination of costs from unused data acquired from expensive sources such as credit and data bureaus. The following features support Process Commander research capabilities: Connector and Service Rules Enterprise integration rules that enable interfacing between Process Commander and other systems. Data Transformation Rules Rules that automate data mapping and parsing between disparate systems.
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Inference Rules Engine Inference rules that track changes to data associated with work and automate the recalculation of relevant fields at the right time.
Process Commander research capabilities are fundamental to its service-centric architecture, where internal and external applications work with Web services in a distributed and loosely coupled infrastructure. Web service activities are described through Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and accessed via the Simple Online Access Protocol (SOAP). Directed Web Access is an important connectivity feature, providing secure process coordination and assignments with occasional users, external users, trading partners, and customers with interactions via a secure URL, recorded in secure audit trails.
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Responding
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Responding
Responding enables you to leverage the power of automation across channels, including customers and partners, to provide responses that are specific to the situation and to the individual, according to the rules set by management. A service level agreement may automatically send e-mail as part of an escalation process, but Process Commander includes a comprehensive rules-driven correspondence facility that dynamically constructs personalized correspondence in various forms for both system users and others. One work item can involve many parties, and correspondence can be sent to any of them. You can respond to your customers and partners, specifying what needs to be said, which language to use, how it is said, and through what medium to send it e-mail, fax, letters, and telephone messaging. The correspondence facility gives you control over the content, generation, medium, and delivery of communications: Multichannel correspondence Facilitates use of HTML, Microsoft Word, Short Message Service (SMS), Portable, Document Format (PDF) e-mail, and fax for ease of communication. Rules drive the composition of correspondence with HTML or Microsoft Word. Verification and modification are managed by rules. You can control whether communication can be updated, and if so, the verification process for change, ensuring that management is included appropriately. Secure and protected content with audit trail Legal copy storage, including images and attachments (Figure 2-13). The entire process of what was done and by whom is stored in an audit trail with a secure copy of what was sent. If an attached document is changed, both the original and revised versions of the document are maintained. The data in the audit trail is available for exporting and analysis with numerous reporting tools.
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Figure 2-13. E-mail Attachment As Record of Communication
Responding to Customer and Partner Service Level Agreements

Quality and customer satisfaction depend upon the management of goals and deadlines. Process Commander provides the right set of management tools to automate the way that you define your goals and deadlines, monitor and manage them, and appropriately escalate work to ensure that you meet your service obligations to customers. You can notify and manage through a variety of means such as e-mail, pagers, or transferring work. The forms by which you define goals and deadlines are simple to use, enabling business users to be responsible for service level management. Process Commander service level, business activity monitoring, and response capabilities empower you to automate process management to help drive service standards through your organization. Service level agreements (SLAs) automate process flow, assignments, and rule execution based on time. SLAs enable business analysts to define time-based quality metrics tied to goals (the desired amount of time to completion) and deadlines (the maximum amount of time). SLA definitions can contain notification and escalation events to automate responses when the goals and deadlines are exceeded. Notification types can include e-mail, pages, or phone calls to management informing them about work or assignments not completed on time. These messages equip managers with the information required to manage work in process and improve service delivery (Figure 2-14).
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Responding
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Figure 2-14. Service Level Agreement Form
Triggers: Automated Database Monitoring

In addition to monitoring processes, work, and assignments, Process Commander can monitor databases to detect specific types of changes. A trigger can be defined to perform a specific action based on a change to a specific field in a database. Triggers can be set to start a new process, send a notification to a manager, start a new work item, link multiple work items, or create an entry for an audit trail. Business uses for triggers include the following example: Creating an audit trail entry when a charge amount is greater than $1,000. Notifying a marketing manager when inventory exceeds a preset quantity. Notifying a client advisor when an account balance drops below $10,000.
Process Commander triggers are an example of automated monitoring and management capabilities that extend to the data that supports a business process.
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Resolving
Resolving is the ability to automate critical business decisions without human interaction and with higher quality and consistency to complete work quickly. Process Commander provides the facility to drive work through to completion fully automating it where possible and guiding users when their involvement is important: Straight-through processing speeds work to completion, performing transactions from initiation through to resolution whether internally or with trading partners. When human intervention is required, the system intelligently guides users through the process with context sensitive prompts and selection boxes reducing personnel training time and costs.
Using built-in backward chaining, the system works as a partner, asking only essential questions, and then providing choices that make sense to perform the steps of your business process. Because it is not limited to tracking, the system can guide the processing and do not just move the work. As soon as the requestors intent is achieved, the work object can be resolved. Process Commander uses its unique ability to blend practice rules (rules that make decisions and automate actions) and process rules (rules that move and route work through to completion). The rules engine makes the right decisions to do the work; the process management architecture drives work through the organization. Process Commander speeds resolution by enabling your enterprise to respond quickly to critical information changes, detect the need for additional data, and eliminate the need for some information and many repetitive actions. Smart rules resolve requests and automatically execute related activities for example, creating transactions, transmitting data to the right systems, managing work process adjustments in external systems, and synchronizing multiple and related requests.
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Resolving
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When human judgment is required for resolution, the system guides the user through the process with extensive use of context-sensitive prompts and selection boxes based on declarative rules, described below.
Declarative Rules
Business processes often include decisions with interdependent, frequently changing values and calculations. Process Commander provides declarative rules for automating the use of such changing information. You define (or declare) the relationship between properties in a declarative rule. Process Commander uses the rule and automatically recalculates the property on which the rule was defined if any of the values specified in the formula change. An example of using declarative rules occurs in calculating loan amounts at a financial institution. A loan application may support several types of loan requests, including mortgages. The lender needs to calculate the total of the loan amount plus the estimated fees in the closing costs and recalculate automatically if any of the component amounts change. A declarative expression can define these calculations and value checks. In addition, constraints defined to proactively monitor information entered into Process Commander automatically check whether a property value meets specified criteria based on a defined formula. These sophisticated algorithms enable declarative rules to reach out and dynamically select the right data, reducing the need for complex procedural logic in building applications and manual exception handling in driving work to completion.
Automated Processing to Resolve Work

SmartBPM makes the decisions about how intent-driven work is resolved and easily integrates with back-end systems to update system records and complete work. Process Commander resolves work through these key rules: Flow Rules Process rules that manage, monitor, and automate work as it is assigned throughout a workflow. Activity Rules Computations, decisions, and business logic recorded as an automated procedure. Application developers will find creating and testing
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activity rules to be similar to that for traditional programs. Activities may also incorporate custom Java. Decision Tree Rules Practice rules to make complex decisions with various, sometimes unrelated data, returning the appropriate response based on given facts. Decision Table Rules Practice rules that return an answer or variable based on a single or multiple set of when conditions. Declarative Rules Define computations and comparisons through nonprocedural statements and formulas. Declarative Expressions Rules Practice rules used when the value of a numeric field needs to be computed dynamically and recomputed automatically if any related values change. The dependency network display shows rule dependencies, prompts for data to test the selected rule, and provides for what-if analysis based on varying input for declarative rule modeling and further testing.
SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion The Underlying Difference
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The Underlying Difference

Out of the box, Process Commander provides the power to implement and manage business processes with efficiency and agility. Standard flows can control the Six Rs of common process management situations, including how work is managed, captured, approved, verified, delegated, and coordinated. These and other built-in functions define and integrate participants such as individuals, companies, departments, and governmental organizations in the work process. Process Commander delivers a unique blend of process and practice rules demonstrated in the Six Rs and by what Pegasystems calls SmartBPM. The smart of SmartBPM comes directly from the systems ability to capture and incorporate all the business rules (process and practice) needed to operate an enterprise effectively. SmartBPM drives business agility for growth, productivity and compliance for your business success. Process Commander is built using PegaRULES, an enterprise business rules engine, providing robust rules management and execution. At runtime, the patented rules technology dynamically selects the right process or business rule depending on the business purpose, product, organization, RuleSet and version, date, time, circumstance, and security for each rule required. The system understands the users intent. Once selected, the rule is converted to Java and executed in your environment at Java speed. In addition, Process Commander provides exceptional process and rule management facilities such as check-in/out and debugging capabilities to speed development and deployment.
Chapter 3 Building for Change and Productivity

Your enterprise is a composite of many functions and businesses. Your BPM solution must support multiple processes workflows, complex decisions, and high transaction volumes integrated across your infrastructure. Process Commander delivers a feature-rich BPM solution that is ready to implement right out of the box so you can get a basic, business process application up and running quickly. For more complex applications, you can use standard Process Commander components as a starting point and tailor them to suit your needs. With Process Commander, your organization gains an integrated environment that supports the BPM lifecycle. Whether for business users or developers, this cohesive environment enables your staff to move solutions into production quickly.
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Introduction Building for Change and Productivity
Rules-Based BPM Change and Productivity

Process Commander is based on PegaRULES, a patented enterprise business rules engine that provides robust process and business rules execution and management the foundation for flexibility and agility. This patented rules technology dynamically selects the right process or business rule depending on the business purpose, product, organization, RuleSet and version, date, time, circumstance, and security for each rule required. Once selected, the rule is converted to Java at runtime and executed in your environment. Process Commander provides exceptional process and rules management facilities to speed application development, management, and deployment. Process Commander provides both practice and process rules in one integrated package, enabling users to develop, execute, manage, maintain, and grow their own decision-intensive BPM applications efficiently. Process Commander is built in Java and uses an XML data structure, generates Java in processing, and runs on leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers. Process Commander demonstrates what many leading industry analysts have concluded: It is significantly more productive to build and change complex, decision-intensive applications with rules-based BPM systems than with systems that use custom code.
Development and Management Productivity

Research has shown that development for successful, on-time applications starts small and iterates to increase application size and complexity. For maximum benefit and efficiency, this approach depends on a development methodology that promotes rapid deployment. The methodology must emphasize active user involvement, iterative design methods, and frequent, smaller deliverables. With Process Commander, you can design, build, and continuously evolve BPM applications in less time than typically associated with developing custom codebased solutions. In fact, the more complex the application, the greater the benefit in time saved.
Building for Change and Productivity Rules-Based BPM Change and Productivity
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Process Commander supports developer productivity with the following: Intuitive browser interface Provides access to development and application functions. Embedded Microsoft Visio Provides a graphical front end to the PegaRULES database. This familiar visual tool for process design includes specialized Process Commander SmartShapes to simplify the task for business and technical users. Fit-for-purpose forms Prompt technical and business users for Englishlanguage rules. Application explorer Easily navigate to maintain and evolve rules via an application-specific portal view (Figure 3-1).
Figure 3-1. Application Explorer
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Step-by-step accelerators Move technical users through common development tasks, such as setting up the foundation for a new application, adding data tables, and integrating with external systems. Built-in versioning of process and practice rules Enables fast, easy change, including rollback. Rule flexibility Provides for partner-defined rule types. Industry-standard BRE Java APIs (JSR 94 and JSR 168) Support openness. Packaged Java methods for common operations, plus the ability to write custom in-line Java Deliver both speed and flexibility for developers. Tools for application debugging and performance management Promote productivity.
Flexibility and Power

Process Commander gives you the ability to deploy a BPM solution that is built for change. With XML flexibility and relational database power, you can add new information as needed. Key components of the business process architecture are easy to define and integrate out of the box. For example, the following work model structures are included: Standard process flows Enable you to control common work situations how work is captured, approved, verified, delegated, coordinated, and resolved. Standard work types and properties Allow you to automatically capture information that is important in managing a business process:
Work status during the different stage of a workflow Service levels and deadlines Customer satisfaction measures Throughput and resolution monitoring
Building for Change and Productivity Rules-Based BPM Change and Productivity
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Work objects Flexible structures that process evolving information about an individual unit of work. These work objects (also called work items) enable you to add new fields and information to work in progress. The added information can connect to external databases for reporting and warehousing. This unique facility allows you to capture work objects designed in an XML structure and expose them in a relational database. Organizations can respond quickly to change and be flexible in how they use critical information.
Covers A work structure that groups a collection of work objects to support complex work with parallel and other types of processing often used in case management. This structure enables coordinated handling (responding, reporting, and sending correspondence) of the collection as a coherent unit. Folders Supplement covers by supporting many-to-many relationships among work objects. Folders are used to associate information for reference, investigation, or analysis.
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Comprehensive Support for Complete BPM Lifecycle

Delivering a BPM solution is an iterative process that starts with application design, moves on to implementation, and continues to evolve based on information gathered over time regarding process efficiency and staff productivity. Like business itself, BPM solutions are rarely static once they are in production. Process Commander has a full range of capabilities that support this iterative progression through the lifecycle (Figure 3-2).
Figure 3-2. Continuous Improvement Through the BPM Lifecycle For the design phase and beyond, an integrated development environment provides application accelerators and fit-for-purpose tools in familiar environments for both business and technical users. Using the integrated development environment, business analysts and process architects can model and design process flows. With PegaRULES Process Simulator, the team can simulate and change the flows, then use the accelerator to build an application and, with version management, pilot it to a subset of users. After the simulation run is complete, business managers can inspect and analyze the results using PegaRULES Process Analyzer. The resulting OLAP cubes and reports are conveniently accessible from the simulation console. The OLAP cubes can be
Building for Change and Productivity Comprehensive Support for Complete BPM Lifecycle
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used to examine historical work data with data from the simulation run. This capability empowers business managers to compare the what-if analysis data with real work data to identify smart changes. Once an application is in full production, a business-friendly dashboard offers singleclick access to automated and interactive business activity monitoring features (BAM) to support process analysis and continuous improvement. This built-in tool provides common metrics such as service levels and process cost calculations for additional detail-level statistics.
Application Evolution and Management

Monitoring business activities and results can provide the basis for improved processes and new versions of applications. The power of rules in business operations can influence and optimize process execution to significant business advantage. Evolution of a Process Commander application involves two types of changes: Changes to practice and business rules. Process architects (business users or analysts) typically perform these changes as needed without technical assistance. Changes to process rules, application logic, and system architecture. A process architect/system architect team is typically responsible for these more complex changes, requiring underlying design work (and often programming). One of the most important factors in evaluating a BPM development environment is how easy it is to change or update the application once it is in production. Modifications are easy with Process Commander. Making changes to Visio flow diagrams automatically drives changes to the underlying rules and processes. This is in contrast to other development environments that require code and database changes, as well as recompilation, to implement change. The ease of changing and updating applications supports progression through the application lifecycle, providing the flexibility and productivity that businesses require.
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Integrated Development Environment

The Process Commander Portal is a browser-based interface with an integrated environment for building, testing, and using applications. Portal layouts for each job function provide the elements to perform related tasks, without the need for separate design and runtime tools or environments. A single browser-based thin client for users and developers streamlines application development, deployment, and use.
Process Commander Environment and Job Functions

In this integrated environment, the Process Commander Portal presents portal layouts for each of the job functions defined in the list below. When you log in, Process Commander finds your defined role and presents the appropriate portal. Business workers Use the Process Commander application to receive, process, and resolve work. Business managers Use the Process Commander application to monitor and approve work performance and quality for groups of business workers. Developers and implementers Build and evolve Process Commander applications:
Process architect Business user or business analyst who defines and maintains business rules, service levels, and flows or processes. Preferred experience includes business process flowcharting, user interface design, and business logic definition (such as spreadsheet functions or macros). System architect Application developer who creates the class structure for your work with supporting automation capabilities, and implements interfaces with external systems. Preferred experience includes data modeling and relational databases, object-oriented programming and modular design, and system connectivity and interfaces. System administrator Systems engineer who is responsible for installation and setup, security, and other operational functions. Preferred experience includes hardware and operating system administration for your platform, user and network management tools, and database management tools for your database platform.
Building for Change and Productivity Integrated Development Environment
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Easy to Develop, Deploy, and Manage Processes and Rules

Process Commander provides productivity drivers for business workers and managers, developers, and implementers, enabling easy collaboration.
For business workers and business managers:

Intuitive browser interface provides ease of use for many types of users business workers, developers, and system administrators. Process flows are easy to customize with browsers and Microsoft Visio. Importing and leveraging your existing Visio diagrams significantly streamlines both development and process harvesting. Efficient data record entry is available through industry-standard applications such as Microsoft Excel supporting single-click import of data records from a source file. For business managers, the layout of the process management portal is designed for supervisory use. Managers can quickly monitor work in progress, assess service level agreements, and easily transfer work as needed (Figure 3-3).
Figure 3-3. Transferring Work in Bulk to an Available User
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For developers and implementers:

Both business rule- and process-based development processes are built on a common, easy-to-use, extensible framework. Extensible PegaRULES database is ready to implement out of the box. A significant number of business logic features are built in, including:
Directed Web Access, providing the ability to assign work to external users by means of e-mail Service level agreements Fit-for-purpose forms (HTML format)
Features such as rule resolution and inference engine boost productivity, increase application richness, and allow easy change. Process and rule management facilities such as check-in/out and debugging capabilities speed development and deployment. RuleSets and versioning provide efficient, safe deployment of process and practice rules. Application packaging is easy with built-in facilities to package and move applications to other Process Commander systems.
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Building for Change Developer Productivity

The Process Commander Portal provides an enhanced layout for with streamlined user interface for developer/system architect productivity (Figure 3-4): Clean, harmonious layout with color-coding to highlight the current task Logical navigation for todays browser-fluent users the navigation panel on the left and the context-sensitive workspace on the right Expandable navigation bars for task selection Expandable workspace sections for context control
Figure 3-4. Portal Layout for Designers Development Productivity
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The Right Tools for Developers

Process Commander enhances system architect/developer productivity with the right application management and development tools, including: Application Explorer Conveniently packages and extends components and rules of an application, shows all rules used by an application, and enables users to access rules according to their class. Flow Explorer Provides quick access to locate and create rules for your environment and organization. The Flow Explorer includes online help for information about Process Commander functions and tasks. The explorer graphically shows the flow rule network of an application so that developers can easily access, navigate, manage, and change process rules and related business rules (Figure 3-5).
Figure 3-5. Flow Explorer
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Graphical Process Rule Navigation Provides access to the right process rule with ease and single-click to preview HTML forms within an application. A right mouse click on a flow action or routing activity opens the view to enable testing and access to associated rules and flow actions. This environment also enables testing and editing associated user interface screens. Dependency network analysis Graphically shows a rule dependency network for business rules and provides a console to test and debug interrelated rules. Application rule inventory Creates a document that provides a list of all rules within an application. Application document generator Creates a blueprint of an application, assisting users in understanding application components, flows, and rules as well as providing system architects with versioned release notes (Figure 3-6).
Figure 3-6. Blueprint of an Application
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Drag-and-drop user interface Reduces interface development time, making it easy to evolve application user interfaces. Rule execution testing Easily tests all major declarative rules in real time. Smart rule testing dynamically prompts for data input and returns a test value. Latest generation decision trees Provide systems architects with detailed information and powerful control over the patterns of decision tree logic in an English-like context (Figure 3-7). Architects can specify the functions that are accessible to users and, for consistency, control the return values that users can insert.
Figure 3-7. Latest Generation Decision Trees for Easy Control over Patterns of Logic
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Rule harvesting Enables business users to create rules using familiar desktop tools such as Excel. Uploading metadata files assists business analysts in editing and related development tasks. Robust swim lane process rules Unlimited swim lanes using values set to organization units or property values. Process, practice, and system rules can be modeled within swim lanes, to organize flows and rules visually into a process context (Figure 3-8).
Figure 3-8. Swim Lanes to Organize Flows and Rules Visually into a Process Context
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Service rules accelerator Dynamically guides the integration process and streamlines the creation of services for major protocols such as JSR 94, JSR 168, SOAP, EJB, and WebSphere MQ. JSR 168 harness support Assures that your portal complies with JSR 168 standards and auto-generates the HTML source. Drag-and-drop capabilities mean the portal rule form requires no HTML programming. BPMN notation support Enables use of standard notation. A BPMN stencil aids construction of Visio process flows. When a BPMN shape is dragged onto the working canvas, it dynamically calls rule-setting fields. Tracer Monitors and debugs rule and process execution. The Tracer detects, highlights, and provides a direct link to the rule form that requires correction. Clipboard Structured memory area that holds session-specific data associated with each Process Commander user and process. Review the current contents of the clipboard or test processes and business rules on the fly (Figure 3-9).
Figure 3-9. Portal with Clipboard
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Speeding BPM Application Development Application Accelerator

Process Commander provides an easy-to-use application accelerator to set up the foundation of an application. The application accelerator automates the Process Commander design methodology by implementing the application design based on parameters the developer supplies. This guided process significantly decreases training and development time (Figure 3-10).
Figure 3-10. Speeding Development with the Application Accelerator
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Efficient Management System Administrator Productivity

Process Commander provides information and tools for system administrators who are responsible for the operating system and user environment, including security and ongoing operational tasks such as tuning and troubleshooting. The Process Commander Portal provides an intuitive system administrator layout for easy access to tools for system management (Figure 3-11), including: Adding new operators and organizational units. Maintenance of organizational structures, including divisions, units, work groups and operators; tracking of usage statistics. Setting up and maintaining databases. Implementing and managing security settings. Creating and modifying RuleSet versions. Deploying applications by importing and exporting complete applications between systems. Using integration services, including accelerators, to connect to external systems.
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Figure 3-11. Portal Layout for System Administrators
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Obtaining statistics on system resources and usage with the Performance Analyzer to analyze how a given business process will impact production performance and system capacity (Figure 3-12). Using reporting capabilities to track information such as users and services currently connected to the systems, registered operators, usage statistics, and system performance (including performance graphs).
Figure 3-12. Performance Analyzer
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Ease of Deployment for BPM Applications

Process Commander provides effective facilities for application deployment, accommodating application testing and availability as well as supporting database and system requirements: Exporting complete applications Uses the Move Rules facility to download the rules (in the form of a RuleSet) and associated data for an application to a Zip file. The complementary Load Rules facility uploads the Zip file contents onto the target Process Commander system, making the application available (Figure 3-13).
Figure 3-13. Easy Application Deployment via Rule Export/Import RuleSet versioning Provides flexible, efficient rule management, including a valuable technique to test newly deployed processes and applications. Using versioning, system administrators can specify the RuleSet that users can access. Deployment across multiple servers Increases system availability in a production environment as processing can span multiple servers that support the Process Commander rules engine. Each server can have multiple central processing units. Users can connect to any server through load balancing. Servers can start and stop independently without disrupting operation of the entire system. Deployment with multiple database instances Provides flexibility in database deployment. The Process Commander database can be split among multiple database instances on a single server or across multiple servers.
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This flexibility facilitates performance tuning, backup, use of available computers and disk space, and evolutionary growth.
Robust Version Management

Process Commander provides comprehensive version management capabilities. Built-in versioning of processes and rules allows fast, easy changes (including rollback) to rules in production in real time.
Working with RuleSets and Versions

A RuleSet stores a related group of business rules that define a process and application or part of the application. A Process Commander application comprises one or more RuleSets and related information. An application RuleSet is what you deploy in your production environment or ship to a customer. RuleSets provide security, version control, and environment control. RuleSets need not be complete unto themselves; they often depend on other RuleSets to provide the rest of the rules needed for application processing. For example, a mortgage RuleSet may rely on rules in a more basic loan accounting RuleSet. To create your application, you create a RuleSet that contains just those rules that are specific to your application, relying on the other RuleSets upon which it is built to do the rest.
Using RuleSets to Group and Manage Rules

Process Commander RuleSets group and store related business rules for security and rules management. Every RuleSet has a name and version to facilitate identification, management, deployment, and processing. In contrast to many development tools, a Process Commander application can evolve substantially while in production. With appropriate testing, planning, and safeguards, developers and system administrators can make a new RuleSet version available only to a select group of users. The version number dictates which rules are accessible to users, as defined in their profiles.
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Integrating version management with user profiles lets businesses easily test, deploy, and roll back rules within a production environment. This versioning scheme is flexible enough to provide a wide variety of deployment and test scenarios for application developers. For example, rule delegation and management make it easy to have a collaborative development and review process, including capabilities such as the following: Roll back to older, proven RuleSets if necessary. Apply special or experimental rules only at certain times of the day, perhaps when volume is typically low. Dynamically add a new property to work objects, add the property to HTML forms for user input, and include the property in all subsequent work. For added security, mark specific rules as final to prevent further customization. Easily move applications to other systems.
Controlling Access Through Versioning

With version management, users, access groups, and organizational units can each be assigned specific RuleSet names and versions that only they can access. For example, a system may contain many versions of the RuleSet YourCoLoan, with the highest version numbered 04-04-18. If the system administrator specifies only the major release digits (04) within a user profile, the rules engine lets this user access the highest versions it can find of rules in the 04 versions in this case, up to 04-04-18. If the system administrator specifies 04-04, the user can access rules up to the highest-level version in the interim release up to 04-04-18. Finally, if all three levels are defined as 04-03-03, the system selects the highest number from all versions, up to exactly this version.
Ensuring Rule Review

Versioning makes it possible to define review and approval requirements for any RuleSet version by using rules management facilities such as check-in/out. This kind of review helps ensure that the rules in a RuleSet meet business requirements.
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Rules-Driven Localization
Essential for the demands of todays global economy, localized business solutions can present development challenges without the right development environment. Process Commander is fundamentally architected to provide efficient rules-driven support for localization. Process Commander uses patented rule resolution technology to determine the most appropriate rule to apply to a particular situation. Through rule resolution and comprehensive version management capabilities, a single Process Commander application can support multiple users with different locales (Figure 3-14). In addition, the adoption of open internationalization standards eliminates the need for locale-specific programming. The following are standard terms used to refer to localization concepts: Localization Building applications to suit cultural and geographic needs. Localized Product or application built for a specific culture or geography. Internationalization Process of adding localization support to a software product.
Localization involves creation of language-specific and/or locale-specific versions of the desired presentation rules. Use of appropriate rule versions is designated via locale-specific RuleSets. A localized version of a rule is the same as any other version of a rule the power and speed of rule resolution applies equally. Process Commander streamlines the process of building localized applications, starting with development and extending to packaging, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. Language-specific RuleSet packaging is particularly convenient for translation outsourcing or assignment to resources outside the immediate development team. For ease of maintenance, standard rule reports offer quick access to localized rules. Applications can be easily localized as much or as little, and for as many geographic constituencies, as needed without significant recoding to explicitly handle different locales. Process Commander uses the full power of rule resolution to present users with an environment in their preferred locale.
Building for Change and Productivity Rules-Driven Localization
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For example, business calendars are fundamental to processing work in BPM applications. Some aspects impact the user interface, such as the ability to view dates in the expected format or select dates from a localized calendar control. Other aspects affect data-based calculations, such as the ability to accommodate holidays and the number of business days in a week. Process Commander provides the appropriate level of control to localize both aspects of BPM solutions.
Figure 3-14. Managing Localization with the Power of Rules Resolution
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The Right Process or Business Rule at the Right Time

Pegasystems patented rules technology is the foundation of Process Commander BPM solutions, providing flexibility and agility. At execution, Process Commander dynamically selects the right process or business rule depending on the business purpose, product, organization, RuleSet and version, date, time, customer-associated circumstance, and security for each rule required (Figure 3-15). Through dynamic rule selection, Process Commander provides flexibility that is otherwise impossible with the alternative of applying rules specified in code. In a BPM application, general rules handle general problems and specialized rules are for specific purposes. For example, a general rule called Return Authorization handles most appliance returns, and a specialized version of the rule handles an exception such as gas stoves. Rule resolution identifies and executes the right rule at the right time without requiring nested if-then statements. Process Commander rule resolution simplifies the management and extension of business and process rules in a production environment. Rule resolution is more effective than storing and managing rules with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Web services, or Java code where the right rule must be determined at design time. In contrast, rule resolution permits late-bound decisions to rules at run time. Late-bound decision making is the binding or grouping of relevant rules assigned as on call so that the application returns a correct answer for a particular decision.
Building for Change and Productivity The Right Process or Business Rule at the Right Time
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Figure 3-15. Rule Resolution Selecting the Best Rule at the Right Time
Applications Starting with a Class Hierarchy to Ensure Reuse

Process Commander leverages an object-oriented environment to manage process and business rules and organizes objects and rules in classes. Developers begin Process Commander application development by designing the class structure, which defines work and data characteristics and forms the foundation for the application. The class structure provides the skeleton for an application and determines the path of rule resolution the process by which the rules engine selects the right rule in each situation. After the class structure is in place, the next step is to create rules at the appropriate place in the hierarchy to define the business policies, practices, and processes for each type of work. Rule resolution follows the class hierarchy and inheritance to find the correct rules to apply for each type and instance of work object. Hierarchical searching of the class structure plus version management enables deployment of generalized processes that apply to all users and/or products, as well as more specialized processes that apply to specific users or products.
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Building for Change Flexibility and Agility

Process Commander is unique in that all process, business rule, and integration logic is developed and executed using a common object model approach. This rules foundation is the basis of Process Commander flexibility and agility. These characteristics are demonstrated in the BPM lifecycle with dynamic process analysis, collaborative design, easy of deployment, and continuous improvement monitoring. Unmatched ease of versioning provides the ability to move between versions to respond to changing requirements and opportunities for improvement. Finally, with Process Commander, ease of customization enables efficient change to the BPM interface tailoring for particular roles, regions, and languages all while keeping the underlying database model and flows the same.
Chapter 4 Leveraging Enterprise Architecture

Leveraging your enterprise systems is essential to building for change and productivity. Your current enterprise architecture with its applications and data is fundamental to the operation of your business. For optimal productivity, your business process management system should be able to make use of your current environment. PegaRULES has a flexible, open architecture. It allows you to execute the rules engine in a variety of configurations and platforms. In addition, PegaRULES nodes can run concurrently on heterogeneous platforms. This capability provides flexibility to system administrators in configuring and deploying user accounts or execution models against a shared PegaRULES database. Process Commander provides powerful integration facilities, enabling you to use and complement existing systems and applications. The Process Commander architecture is open and built for integration and scale, with the ability to interact readily with external systems using industry-standard technologies.
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Introduction Leveraging Enterprise Architecture
PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture Patterns

The flexible architecture of PegaRULES Process Commander supports several patterns that can be deployed with variations to fit the specific platform requirements of an enterprise business rules application and technology environemnt. Figure 4-1 shows the components of the PegaRULES internal architecture.
Figure 4-1. PegaRULES Process Commander Internal Architecture As illustrated, the PegaRULES engine consists of a run-time environment, including the forward and backward chaining inference engine. The engine maintains the rules and executes Pegasystems patented rule resolution algorithm. The environment also includes the clipboard containing XML objects that represent the work data for various users or requestors. The run-time environment also provides other essential capabilities such as performance monitoring, security management, context management, Java caching, and database access. PegaRULES runs as a collection of loosely coupled nodes that bring the execution of processes and rules in proximity to the requesting user or system. PegaRULES can
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture Patterns
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support various architectural designs. The patterns shown in the following sections are examples of fundamental implementations.
Basic Multitier Pattern with Servlets

PegaRULES runs as servlets within the Web container of a J2EE application server (or a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat). The rules engine runs selfcontained within the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) .
Figure 4-2. Multitier Java Architecture Portable and Powerful A number of servlets are associated with PegaRULES including the PRServlet (the standard servlet) as well as servlets for system monitoring, rule tracing, and external services. PegaRULES servlets run within the Web container of a J2EE application server (or a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat). PegaRULES also supports server tier architectures and EJBs.
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Process Commander is designed to run as a Web application, built in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support a Web services environment, such as SOAP and other industry-standard transports. While these architecture patterns are well served by the J2EE framework, two other primary integration methods batch and embedded are not. For certain high-performance applications, embedded or batch processing provides a better alternative. For this reason, Process Commander is built to run within the J2EE environment without inheriting its limitations. In the multitier architecture, Process Commander sends HTML to the browser for both business user and developer/administrator functions. HTML screens are managed using specialized HTML rules within the rules engine.
Embedded Java Application Pattern

PegaRULES supports the JSR 94 standard rules application interface (API). The rules engine can be invoked through the Java API and can execute within a rules engine application on the same Java virtual machine (JVM). With this pattern, client applications can embed the rules engine in the overall Java code of their applications (Figure 4-3).
Figure 4-3. Embedded PegaRULES Engine
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture Patterns
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Batch Processing Pattern

The embedded Java application pattern can be used in processing large volumes of business rule transactions through batch scripts (Figure 4-4). PegaRULES uses file listeners to support batch processing. With file listeners, a batch job (or any other application) can write files to a prescribed folder. The PegaRULES listener can then pick up and execute these files in high volume.
Figure 4-4. PegaRULES Engine in Batch Processing The robust PegaRULES engine also supports other architecture patterns. However, the patterns described in the previous sections provide the flexibility that system administrators and application developers need in deploying enterprise applications.
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PegaRULES Process Commander Integration Services

PegaRULES Process Commander includes integration services based on industrystandard technologies. Using these integration facilities, Process Commander can exchange information with other systems, including mainframe and legacy systems, relational databases, ERP systems, e-mail servers, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and even simple text files. In this way, your Process Commander application can take advantage of data and logic that is already accessible to your enterprise, or enable other enterprise applications to take advantage of data and rules in Process Commander. With these integration facilities, Process Commander can act as a client (the requestor) or server (the responder) using connector and service rules. A Process Commander application typically contains multiple connectors and services.
Standard Integration Facilities

Process Commander enables developers to use standard integration services, such as Microsoft COM, CORBA, Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), e-mail, IBM WebSphere MQ, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) SOAP. Open Java and XML architecture designed to integrate readily and effectively. Easy-to-use accelerators to streamline integration with Microsoft .NET, SOAP, Sun Microsystems Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), e-mail, and other common services and connectors. Efficient data mapping with automated processing between Process Commander and other structured or unstructured system formats.
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture Security for Enterprise Requirements
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Security for Enterprise Requirements

Process Commander provides flexible, layered access control capabilities. The primary focus is to protect the integrity of your enterprise data and processing.
Authentication and Authorization

The Process Commander security model relies on authentication of users for system access and authorization to control access to particular application elements based on roles and privileges. The fundamental premise of the security model is that access is denied unless explicitly granted. Authentication validates the identity of users with an operator ID and password that the system recognizes. You can coordinate authentication with a central security repository to avoid replicating passwords and other shared configuration information. Once a user is authenticated, Process Commander builds a user profile that allows application access through the various features associated with authorization. Authorization allows you to set more finely tuned access for users once they are authenticated. Authorization provides flexibility through the use of roles and privileges to control access to RuleSets, classes, and other application elements. The Process Commander thin-client design enables secure access, based on user profiles, to all system functions and rules through a Web browser. This capability enables companies to safely distribute and easily maintain business rules within a single business unit, across the entire enterprise, and to partners. As with any browser-based application, Process Commander uses standard HTTP security mechanisms in addition to its own application security model. For example, your system administrator configures the Web server to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for session authentication and/or encryption. Process Commander automatically takes advantage of the added security. This consideration is particularly relevant if you are making an application available via the Web to individuals outside your organization.
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Access Roles and Privileges

Process Commander provides a rich set of rule-based privileges. You can define these extensible privileges in relation to access roles and skills to control who can do what tasks (Figure 4-5).
Figure 4-5. Setting Rule-Based Privileges for Access Control A privilege represents the right to access an object or capability in an application. To facilitate defining privileges, Process Commander includes a set of standard privileges that apply to a wide range of applications. In addition, you can create custom privileges to control access to elements of your application as necessary.
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture Built for Scale, Performance, and Resiliency
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Built for Scale, Performance, and Resiliency

Process Commander incorporates capabilities designed to facilitate performance in sophisticated BPM environments. These capabilities include fast compiling of processes and rules into Java; distributed execution for local speed; rule caching for optimized access; and declarative rules for value- and property-based automatic calculation. Process Commander is also built for resiliency, which is essential for supporting the many aspects of access and availability that businesses require.
Compiling Rules and Processes

Process Commander architecture uses a distinctive approach called rules assembly to dynamically compile processes and decision rules into Java for improved performance. During the first time that processes are executed, the engine dynamically builds a Java class reflecting the contents of the process and the associated decision rules that are referenced or involved when the process is executed. This class is compiled on the server so that subsequent access to the process and decision rules can use the mainstream Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to execute with exceptionally high performance. By taking advantage of the continually improving performance of the JVM architecture, users get the flexibility of rules with the performance of Java.
Distributed Execution for Local Speed

Process Commander can run as a series of loosely coupled nodes that place the execution of processes and rules close to the requesting user or system. Nodes can run in the context of Web servers or as standalone engines to provide services to other applications. Additionally, nodes can be called directly by other applications or provide a foundation in which BPM applications can be developed and deployed. Multiple nodes share a common PegaRULES database and behave as a single system, providing the ability to provide essentially local performance over distributed physical machines. This distributed processing ensures that business processes can execute close to the needs of users for exceptional performance.
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Declarative Rules for Speed and Effectiveness

Process Commander is built on PegaRULES, which integrates the full power of an inference engine to the execution of dynamic business processes. This integration incorporates both an easy model for evolving the rules that control the business process and the exceptional performance provided by an integrated rules engine. One example of how Process Commander leverages this technology is through changeaware declarative rules that fire only when underlying data actually changes. This is far more efficient then other processing models where recalculations or validations are performed in a procedural setting, even if there is no reason to do them at execution.
Distributed Execution of Common Processes

PegaRULES is deployed in a segmented, multinode architecture (Figure 4-6). Relational databases store rule definitions and persistent data, for example, work objects, that Process Commander maintains. A work object is configurable and can be stored across multiple tables and even multiple database instances. Having a centralized PegaRULES database allows all instances of the rules engine to behave identically, regardless of the location or the platform, with these advantages: People and systems are equal participants. Mixed environments provide flexibility, growth, and reliability. Maximum scale is possible with multiple CPUs and multinode systems. Common management is provided for processes, rules, and work data.
Rule Caching for Optimized Access

PegaRULES promotes system performance with the rules assembly process first use of a rule within the rules engine. The rule is extracted from the PegaRULES database in its XML definition, assembled into Java source code locally on the server, compiled, and then loaded into a Java cache. Subsequent processing of the rule does not require the overhead of rules assembly. Each node maintains a cache of process and decision rules as they are accessed, eliminating the need to access the database repeatedly to execute common processes
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture Built for Scale, Performance, and Resiliency
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and decisions, thereby eliminating the latency of a database access. The system automatically synchronizes these caches with the central PegaRULES database so that as processes are updated, the changes are automatically replicated to all nodes on an ongoing basis. In a production environment, calls to the database are minimal because all rules are running locally in cache. Local compilation ensures that rules remain robust and portable. Rule management is simplified because the system does not need to manage multiple versions of byte-code or other intermediate steps. Support of a heterogeneous server environment allows rules engines running on different operating systems and frameworks to connect to a shared single database, and to perform identically.
Figure 4-6. Distributed Execution of Common Processes
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Built for Resiliency

Process Commander includes built-in facilities to support business process resilience. It works with industry standard tools to address the six resiliency building blocks often described by industry leaders as essential to meet the requirements of mission-critical applications: Recovery Process Commander rules and work data are stored entirely in a relational database, allowing the enterprise to leverage its existing database recovery tools. Process Commander also provides its own tools for exporting and importing data and RuleSets, speeding application recovery. Applicationlevel state information can be optionally configured to persist in the database to enable smart requestor recovery when the user reconnects to the system. Hardening Beyond the hardening that the underlying IT structure provides, Process Commander provides built-in security features designed to provide authentication, authorization, and auditing. Systems administrators can use these tools to restrict access to critical parts of the applications. In addition, Process Commander provides support for single sign-on systems, such as Netegrity SiteMinder. Redundancy Process Commander scaling capability makes application redundancy economical and easy to maintain. Accessibility Process Commander processes can be launched by a wide variety of mechanisms. For example, if a Web services directory becomes unavailable, built-in rules can redirect calls to such services as Web forms, EJB calls, e-mail, and MQ messages. Diversification Process Commander applications will run on many platforms without modification. Setting up an application to run on various platforms is a simple task. Automatic Operation Process Commander runs on industry standardmiddleware solutions that provide connections to enterprise software management tools such as Tivoli to handle automated operation and tuning. Process Commander has been proven to run with many such tools in our customers operations.
Leveraging Enterprise Architecture Conclusion
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Conclusion
Process Commander offers the integration of business process with business practice to enable enterprises to manage the full lifecycle of work, from inception through completion. The powerful combination of process and practice enables enterprise to gain strategic and competitive advantage. With Process Commander, organizations have control over vital operations and can focus on critical success factors: productivity, quality, agility, and compliance. Process Commander delivers a rules-driven, object-oriented architecture ready for optimizing application design and development. BPM applications take full advantage of Process Commander integrated process management and rules engine capabilities. The features and tools that are available out of the box pave a faster route to production applications that are more efficiently maintained. Whatever your BPM requirements, Process Commander is uniquely suited to meet the challenge and the obvious rules-based choice for todays competitive business environment.
Appendix A Glossary
This glossary is included to assist you in understanding basic PegaRULES Process Commander terms.
A-2
Introduction Glossary
A
access group A definition that determines the portal layout and access roles for a user. System administrators define access groups and associate them with users. A parameter setting assigned to users to control their access to rules. The process of determining the identity of a user or a requestor. Login is an authentication process. The process of controlling access to particular application elements based on access role.
access role authentication authorization
B
backward chaining The capability to detect and prompt for missing data, allowing computation to advance even though a value or parameter is not explicitly provided. Provides real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Gartner Inc. A software solution providing workflow capabilities. A software component that allows business rules to be recorded in a nonprocedural, nonprogramming form, and uses advanced software techniques to compute the consequences and results of rules.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Business Process Management (BPM) business rules engine
C
class clipboard connector The definition for a type of object in a Process Commander application. An in-memory collection of all data in use within a Process Commander process. A programmatic component that defines and implements an interface between a Process Commander application acting as a client, and an external system acting as a server. See also service.
A-3
correspondence cover
An outgoing e-mail message, printed letter, or FAX produced by an application and its users. A work structure that groups a collection of work objects for coordinated processing.
D
deadline decision declarative constraints rule declarative expressions rule The maximum amount of time from assignment or work object creation to assignment or work object resolution. See also goal. A business practice used to complete work and manage exceptions. The definition of formula-based criteria to check whether a property value meets specified criteria. The constraint is automatically rechecked when the value of any dependent property changes. The computation of the value of a property based on a formula that combines other properties and static values. The target property is automatically recalculated when the value of any dependent property changes. A computational capability to automate the recalculation of a property on which the rule is defined, in relation to interdependent, frequently changing values.
declarative rule
F
flow folder A standard set of steps that represents a business process. Flows can make decisions, execute activities, and perform assignments. A structure that supplements a cover by supporting many-to-many relationships between work objects. Folders are used to associate information for reference, investigation, or analysis.
G
goal The desired amount of time from assignment or work item creation to assignment or work item resolution. See also deadline.
A-4
I
internationalization The process of adding localization support to a software product. See also locale, localization and localized.
J
JSR 94 (Java Specification Requests) JSR 168 (Java Specification Requests) The application interface used to embed PegaRULES Process Commander into other applications. The interface specifications used to enable integration of Process Commander applications into a corporate portal infrastructure.
L
locale "The features of the user's environment that are dependent on language, country, and cultural conventions. This includes, for example, date formats, currency symbol, and sorting order (so, for example, that the letter u with and without an accent character such 1 as an umlaut in German will sort together). See also internationalization, localization, and localized. Building applications to suit cultural and geographic needs. See also internationalization, locale, and localized. A product or application built for a specific culture or geography. See also internationalization, locale, and localization.
localization localized
O
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cubes The use of computing trends and correlations from large databases of raw data to support analysis of process performance.
From Developing International Software by Dr. International, Microsoft Press.
A-5
PegaRULES database
The database that contains the rules, transactions, and other data supporting a Process Commander system, usually stored in one or more relational databases.. Pegasystems patented rule resolution technology used to identify which rules are applied to a specific business decision. A tool used to obtain statistics on system resources and usages. A rule-based capability to make decisions and automate actions. A business user or business analyst who defines and maintains business rules, service levels, flows, and processes. The standard Web browser interface into Process Commander. The Portal rule defines tables and the arrangement and labeling of tools and features on them. A rule-based capability to move and route work items through to completion.
PegaRULES enterprise rules engine Performance Analyzer practice rule process architect Process Commander Portal process rule
R
receiving In Process Commander, the capability to accept work item information from multiple sources human and system as well as create new work. Graphic and textual process monitoring tools to support business activity monitoring (BAM). The capability to have the system automatically request information (from another system or source) needed for processing assignments or work items. The capability to automate business decisions with minimal human intervention. The capability to provide responses specific to the situation and individual, according to rules defined in business processes. An activity that determines which user worklist or workbasket should receive an assignment.
reporting researching
resolving responding routing
A-6
rule
A piece of business logic that defines the behavior of part of an application. Rules are constructed using XML and stored in the PegaRULES database. A statement of conditions and parameters used in processing an application. In business usage, an explicit statement of policy, procedure, or process.
rule resolution
The patented algorithm Process Commander uses to determine the best and most appropriate rule version to apply in a particular situation. The process of generating Java classes during run time and caching them for later use. See PegaRULES patented enterprise rules engine. A group of related classes, flows, and business rules. PegaRULES Process Commander includes four foundation rule sets.
rules assembly rules engine RuleSet
S
service A programmatic component that defines and implements an interface between an external application acting as a client and a Process Commander system acting as a server. See also connector. The time interval to complete a work object. Each service level rule defines one or two time intervals, known as goals and deadlines, indicating the expected or targeted turnaround time for the assignment, or time to resolve for the work object. The automation of process flow, routing assignments, and rule execution based on time. See also service level. See service level agreement. A protocol used to exchange information in a decentralized, distributed environment. SOAP is an XML-based protocol. Automatic processing, without operator intervention.
service level
service level agreement (SLA) SLA SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) services straight-through processing
A-7
system administrator system architect
A system engineer who is responsible for installation and setup, security, and other operational functions. An application developer who creates the class structure for your work with supporting automation capabilities, and implements interfaces with external systems.
T
Tomcat An open source product of the Jakarta project, part of the Apache Software Foundation. Process Commander can execute in the Tomcat servlet container. A tool used to monitor and debug rule execution. A parameter defined to perform an action based on a change to a specific field in a database.
Tracer trigger
U
urgency The relative importance of one assignment or work item to another in relation to service level agreements. A numeric value between 0 and 100 defines the importance of completing and resolving an assignment.
W
WebLogic Web service WebSphere MQ A Web application server product from BEA Systems. A service using the SOAP protocol, which transmits XML-formatted messages. An IBM-developed public standard for message and queue-based interchanges in near real time between systems and applications connected in a network. A representation of an individual task that needs to be done. Work objects are collected in worklists and workbaskets. Container for a set of work objects for processing. A centralized, shared pool of work objects from which users can take work. A list of items assigned to a specific user.
work object workbasket worklist
A-8
WSDL (Web Services Description Language)
An XML format defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Each WSDL file describes network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. A WSDL file describes a SOAP service.
Appendix B Contacting Pegasystems

This appendix describes how to contact Pegasystems for the following: Customer support Education services Documentation feedback Office locations
For more information about our company and products, visit our Web site at www.pega.com.
B-2
Introduction Contacting Pegasystems
Customer Support
Pegasystems Global Services has a dedicated team of support engineers and product specialists ready to respond with support and consulting services. Pegasystems offers a choice of customer support programs to meet your business requirements. Global Services is committed to working in partnership with our customers to deliver worldclass support and service. To contact Pegasystems, go to www.pega.com.
Education Services
Pegasystems Education department offers a wide range of courses for our customers. For course descriptions and contact information, go to www.pega.com. Courses can be presented at customer sites. Courses are given at these locations: Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts Chicago, Illinois San Francisco, California Reading, United Kingdom Sydney, Australia
Pegasystems Certified Professional Program

The Pegasystems Certified Professional Program is an important part of Education Services. The program provides certification examinations for System Architects on the aspects of PegaRULES Process Commander essential to implementing successful applications. For more information, go to www.pega.com.
Contacting Pegasystems Documentation Feedback
B-3
Documentation Feedback
Pegasystems strives to produce high-quality documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, please send us a fax or e-mail with the following information: Document name, version number, and order number (located on the copyright page) Page number Brief description of the problem for example, what instructions are inaccurate, or what information requires clarification
Send faxes to: 617-374-9620, attention Technical Communications. Send e-mail to: docteam@pega.com.
Note: This e-mail address is only for documentation feedback. For a product or
technical question, contact Pegasystems Global Services department.
B-4
Introduction Contacting Pegasystems
Office Locations
Pegasystems maintains offices in these locations: Cambridge, Massachusetts (Headquarters) Alpharetta, Georgia Chicago, Illinois Concord, New Hampshire New York, New York Irving, Texas Toronto, Ontario, Canada Melbourne, Australia Sydney, Australia Paris, France Reading, United Kingdom
For more information, contact your Pegasystems Sales Representative or go to www.pega.com.
Introduction Index
I-1
Index
business process analysis, 2-17 A accelerators, 3-4 Application, 3-17 integration, 3-16, 3-18 access control, 4-8 role, 4-8 through versioning, 3-23 accessibility, 4-12 activity rules, 2-25 Apache Tomcat, 1-20, 4-3 application deployment, 3-18, 3-21 exporting, 3-21 Application Accelerator, 3-17 application explorer, 3-3 architecture, 1-18, 2-20 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), 4-4 thin client, 4-7 architecture patterns batch processing, 4-5 embedded Java application, 4-4 mulittier, 4-3 assignment, 2-6 substitution, 2-11 audit trail, 2-16, 2-23 authentication, 4-7 authorization, 4-7 automatic operation, 4-12 B backward chaining, 2-19, 2-24 BEA WebLogic, 1-20 BPA. See business process analysis BPMN conformance, 3-16 browser, 1-11 business activity monitoring, 2-13, 3-7 business analyst, 1-13 C class hierarchy, 3-27 structure, 3-27 compliance with corporate regulations, 2-14 with government regulations, 2-14 connectors, 4-6 content management, 1-5 CORBA, 4-6 correspondence, 2-21 covers, 3-5 D dashboards, 2-13 data import, 3-9 data mapping, 4-6 database IBM DB2, 1-20 maintaining, 3-18 Microsoft SQL, 1-20 monitoring, 2-23 Oracle, 1-20 deadlines, 2-10, 2-22 decision table rules, 2-26 decision tree, 2-6 rules, 2-26 decisions, 2-6 late-bound, 3-26 declarative constraints rules, 2-26 declarative expressions rules, 2-26 declarative rules, 2-25, 4-10 dependency networks, 2-19, 2-26, 3-13 deployment, 3-21 across multiple servers, 3-21 with multiple database instances, 3-21 deployment of applications, 3-18 Directed Web Access, 2-20, 3-10
I2
Introduction Index
distributed execution, 4-9 diversification, 4-12 E Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), 1-21, 2-5, 3-26, 4-6 Excel templates, 2-17 exporting applications, 3-21 F flow diagrams, 3-7 flow explorer, 3-12 flow rules, 2-25 flows, 2-6, 2-16 folders, 3-5 G goals, 2-10, 2-22 H hardening, 4-12 history trail, 2-16 HTML forms, 2-4 HTTP, 2-20 I IBM DB2, 1-20 MQSeries, 1-21 WebSphere, 1-20 MQ messaging, 2-5, 4-6 integration, 2-4 accelerators, 3-18 connectors, 4-6 services, 3-18, 4-6 internationalization, 3-24 J Java, 3-2 methods, 3-4 Java 2 Enterprise Edition environment, 4-4
Java Virtual Machine (JVM), 4-3, 4-9 JSR 168 conformance, 1-21, 3-16 JSR 94, 3-4 JSR 94 conformance, 1-21 L layouts, 3-8 legacy systems, 4-6 lifecycle BPM, 3-6 management, 1-8 localization, 1-17, 3-24 M methods, Java, 3-4 Microsoft .NET, 1-21 COM, 4-6 Excel, 2-14, 4-6 SQL, 1-20 Visio, 1-11, 1-13, 3-3, 3-7 O Online Analytical Processing cubes, 2-17 operating systems, 1-20 AIX, 1-20 Linux, 1-20 Solaris, 1-20 Windows, 1-20 z/OS, 1-20 Oracle, 1-20 P PegaRULES, 3-2 PegaRULES database, 1-11, 1-16 PegaRULES enterprise rules engine, 1-16, 2-19, 4-3 performance, 4-9 portal, 1-21 integration, 1-4 layouts, 3-8 practice, 1-6 practice rules, 2-24
Introduction Index
I-3
privilege, 4-8 process, 1-6 Process Analyzer, 1-4, 3-6 process architects, 1-13, 2-16, 3-8 job function, 3-8 Process Commander Portal, 1-12, 3-8, 39 navigation, 3-11 process rules, 2-24 Process Simulator, 1-4, 2-18, 3-6 productivity, 3-2, 3-4 R reassignment, 2-11 receiving, 1-8, 2-4 recovery, 4-12 redundancy, 4-12 regulation corporate, 1-7, 2-16 government, 2-16 relational databases, 4-6 report custom, 2-14 exporting, 2-14 standard, 2-14 Web-based, 2-13 wizard, 2-14 reporting, 1-9, 2-13, 2-15, 3-20 researching, 1-10, 2-19 resiliency, 4-12 resolving, 1-10, 2-24 responding, 1-10, 2-21 reuse, 3-27 reviewing rules, 3-23 routing, 1-8, 1-9, 2-6, 2-8 role-based, 2-7, 2-15 skill-based, 2-7, 2-15 rule resolution, 3-10, 3-26 rules activity, 2-25 assignment, 2-6 check-in/check-out, 3-10 connector, 2-19
data transformation, 2-19 decision matrix, 2-26 decision tree, 2-26, 3-14 declarative constraints, 2-26 declarative expressions, 2-26 flow, 2-6, 2-25 harvesting, 3-15 inference, 2-20 practice, 2-24, 3-7 process, 2-24, 3-7 review, 3-23 routing, 2-6 service, 2-19 swim lane process, 3-15 rules assembly, 4-9 RuleSet, 3-10, 3-22 defined, 3-22 locale-specific, 3-24 version, 3-18 versioning, 3-21 S scalability, 4-9 Secure Socket Layer (SSL), 4-7 security, 3-18, 4-7 access control, 4-8 access roles, 4-8 HTTP, 4-7 privileges, 4-8 Secure Socket Layer (SSL), 4-7 Service Level Agreement (SLA), 2-6, 210, 2-22, 3-9, 3-10 escalation, 2-22 notification, 2-22 service levels, 3-4 services, 4-6 list of standard, 4-6 Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), 1-21, 2-20 SmartShapes, 3-3 SOAP, 4-6, See Simple Object Access Protocol Spinoff-Flow method, 2-9
I4
Introduction Index
Split-ForEach method, 2-9 Split-Join method, 2-9 standard reports, 2-14 straight-through processing, 2-24 Sub-Flow method, 2-9 Sun Microsystems, 2-5 swim lane rules, 3-15 system administrators, 3-8 portal layout (fig.), 3-19 productivity, 3-18 system architects, 3-8 job function, 3-8 T Tomcat. See Apache Tomcat tools, 1-15 administrative, 1-11 Clipboard, 3-16 debugging, 3-4 development, 1-11 performance management, 3-4 Tracer, 3-16 transferring work, 2-11 triggers, 2-23 troubleshooting, 3-18 U Unicode, 1-17
urgency levels, 2-10 V version, 1-11, 3-18 management, 3-22 versioning, 3-10 W Web Service Description Language (WSDL), 1-18, 2-20 Web services, 2-20 work items. See work objects Work Management, 2-9 work objects, 3-5 work queues, 2-6 workbaskets, 2-8 workflow, 3-4 worklists, 2-8 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 121, 4-6 WSDL. See Web Service Description Language X XML data structure, 3-2

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Introduction PegaRULES Process Commander

Copyright 2006 Pegasystems Inc., Cambridge, MA

Chapter 1 Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Making Continuous Improvement a Reality

Comprehensive SmartBPM Suite

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Making Continuous Improvement a Reality

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Making Continuous Improvement a Reality

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Smart Business Process Management

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Smart Business Process Management

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Delivering the SmartBPM Difference

Figure 1-3. Receiving Work Clean, Simple Forms Enhance Productivity

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Delivering the SmartBPM Difference

Figure 1-5. Process Commander Report and Drill-Down Capability

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Figure 1-6. Decision Table Speeds Resolution

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Building for Change

Building for Change

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Figure 1-7. Web-Based Process Commander Portal for Ease of Use

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Building for Change

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Powerful Design Environment Ideal for Developers

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Building for Change

Figure 1-9. Drag-and-Drop interface Creation Speeds Development Time

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Object-Oriented Development Environment Ideal for Fast Changes

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite Building for Change

Building Localized Applications for Global Use

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Commitment to Open Architecture

Figure 1-11. PegaRULES Process Commander Architecture

Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite SmartBPM Architecture for the Enterprise

Introduction Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite

Why Pegasystems SmartBPM Suite?

Chapter 2 SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Receiving

Figure 2-1. SmartBPM Six Rs Drive Work to Completion

Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Receiving

Figure 2-2. Receiving Work Easy-to-Use Interface

Standard Technologies for Receiving Work

Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Routing

Skill- and Role-Based Routing

Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

Routing Work to Worklists and Workbaskets

Figure 2-4. Worklist with Assignments and Status

SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Routing

Parallel Work Management

Figure 2-5. Parallel Work Management

Introduction SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion

Service Level Agreements

SmartBPM Driving Work to Completion Routing

Mass Transfer of Work and Assignment Substitution