Welcome to Instant Oracle BPM for Financial Services How-to. Oracle BPM is a key product of Oracle Fusion Middleware. It helps in automating the enterprise business process. A business process can be modeled by a process analyst. Some of the complex integration and processing logic can be implemented by the IT department. BPM helps the business and IT teams to work together in collaboration with each other towards organization's business goals. BPM also helps the business process owners or the people who have funded and invested in the organization to take key business decisions based on various reports and analysis.
Financial services are becoming highly competitive, and customer satisfaction is a critical factor for its survival and growth. In this book, we take a closer look at financial services from an industry point of view, and discuss how BPM can help people at various roles to overcome the challenges faced by them.
Financial services are organizations or business houses that are associated with money management, such as investment banks or commercial banks, insurance companies, mortgaging and stock brokerage firms. Some of the major concerns and challenges that these financial services face revolve around security, customer satisfaction, process management, business process administration, partner and customer relationship management, and so on. We will look at some of these challenges from a business point of view.
Before proceeding further, we need to set up our development environment. For that, we need to have a desktop machine or a laptop with the Windows or Linux operating system installed. It is preferable to have a 64-bit operating system with more than 4-GB RAM. Alternatively, if you have access, you can use an Oracle SOA BPM WebCenter pre-installed virtual machine, or you can configure one yourself.
The full list of software packages required is as follows:
The demos and examples used in this book are developed on the Fedora 17 Linux operating system (64-bit) having 12-GB RAM and 6-core processor with Oracle Database 11g Release 1 installed on it, and running the following software packages:
In this recipe, we will configure a WebLogic domain to include Oracle WebCenter Portal with BPM Process Spaces, so that we can use WebCenter Portal to access BPM process-related process tasks and monitor the process. The commands that we run in this recipe use a system name of james
on a Linux-based operating system.
cd /home/james/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_SOA1/common/bin [james@james bin]$ ./config.sh
This will launch the domain configuration wizard. Select the option to create a new Domain.
fmw_domain
, and then click on Finish.fmw_domain
and patch it up with the oracle.bpm.spaces_template_11.1.1.jar
template to enable BPM Process Spaces within WebCenter.process-portal-install.properties
in the /home/james/Oracle/Middleware/Oracle_SOA1/bpm/process_spaces
folder, and run the Ant script as shown in following command:/home/james/Oracle/Middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin/ant -f install.xml
http://localhost:7001/em
) and configure Content Server with its default intradoc server port, 4444, and a UCM connection in WebCenter.Log in to WebCenter Portal at http://localhost:8888/webcenter
and ensure that the BPM Process Spaces group space is working, and that we are able to access documents in the content repository. Also, this can be a good time to start working on creating a WebCenter Portal template and WebCenter Portal navigation.
This book showcases a home loan use case from build to deployment and from run to manage. It would also be interesting to know that Oracle has process accelerators—a prebuilt, "ready to deploy" BPM process that meets industry standards. These process accelerators not only use Oracle BPM, but other Oracle products as well, depending on the business requirements. There are two types of process accelerators: