Chapter 12. Orchestrating Business Processes

Applications and services that span the various business systems within a company’s IT infrastructure and business partners’ IT infrastructures must work together to automate business processes. Process automation is facilitated when the modeling of the business processes is supported by a mechanism to then execute the models. Service orchestration is one technique to enable this to happen. As discussed in Chapter 6, orchestration is a standards-based method to chain together multiple services into a coordinated, executable model. This is really a form of service composition that allows you to expose subsets of business processes as services.

SAP provides various tools and engines for this purpose. SAP Solution Manager provides process content and configuration capabilities that can be customized for a specific company’s needs. ARIS for SAP NetWeaver is a third-party product from IDS Scheer that can be used to customize and enrich the SAP process content. SAP XI provides tools to build and configure business process orchestration models and the run-time engine to execute, manage, and monitor them across their lifecycle.

This chapter discusses some of the XI capabilities and related standards that enable service orchestration within SAP NetWeaver. You will see procedures for creating business process models, Integration Scenarios, and Integration Processes using XI. All of these are based around the WaveCross supplier network scenario for ...

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