In a competitive environment, finding the key differentiator that distinguishes your business from the competition is highly valuable. The recent 2006 Global CEO Study by IBM® Business Consulting Services notes that "Business model innovation matters: Competitive pressures have pushed business model innovation much higher than expected on CEOs' priority lists."
IBM WebSphere® Business Modeler (hereafter known as Business Modeler) is built to provide the capability to analyze and optimize your business processes. Business Modeler is a Business Analyst tool that caters to the line of business user. The design interface is easy to use and supports necessary functionality for business process model design. The Business Modeler provides an environment that offers first-class tooling that supports modeling efforts through click and drop diagramming, an advanced process simulation engine, pre-defined and custom reporting functionalit, as well as support for Crystal Reports ®. Business Modeler also provides an environment that supports Six Sigma initiatives as well as other methodologies and a tool that offers tremendous value as a stand-alone product but also has the ability to integrate with an overall SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) initiative. This article provides more details on the new features for WebSphere Business Modeler version 6.0.2.
What is WebSphere Business Modeler and how are people using it today?
Business Modeler provides the tooling for business analysts to realize capability and usability from their business processes. It is a graphical modeling tool that is organized to provide instant access to process model attributes that add dimension and value to the diagram. Everything you need to design is displayed in an easy-to-use layout, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. WebSphere Business Modeler interface
Business Modeler helps you add life to your models through attributes such as people roles and resources, timetables and duration, work item definitions as well as cost association. It also provides additional advanced capabilities that include:
- Business Process Simulation
- Detailed Analysis of Business Processes
- WSDL, XSD, UML and XML support (import / export)
- The ability to create measurable Key Performance Indicators for monitoring business processes that become runtime processes
- Support for transforming business models to BPEL for WebSphere Process Server runtime
For more on Modeler, see IBM WebSphere Business Modeler overview
Key features of WebSphere Business Modeler version 6.0.2
New features for creating business models
Version 6.0.2 of Business Modeler continues to enhance the business model design experience for Business Analysts. The importance of an easy to use, robust design interface speeds the designing effort by providing a common toolset and ability to share models that have a common understanding. It includes the following new features:
- The ability to import Business Services and Business Objects that maintain the fidelity of Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and XML Schema Definition (XSD).
- The ability to reorder the position of input and output branches for tasks inside your models
- Prevention of overlapping connectors in swimlane mode
- Hints and tips and best practice information for modeling in the Business Modeler.
- Improved simulation performance and scalability of the Business Modeler tooling
- Enhanced search capabilities within the Business Modeler working environment
- Improved business process model validation
- Usability features for rapid business process model design
New features for teaming and reports
Whether you start by importing existing models or assemble them yourself in Business Modeler, you want to share the work with others. The ability to work in a team environment builds upon the common design environment and speeds the design time. Collaboration through design teams using CVS or IBM Rational ClearCase leverages the team environment and increasing model reuse is immediately at hand.
When business analysts want to share the work with key executives and other subject matter experts, there are many reporting options available. Business Modeler version 6.0.2 has new capabilities as well as enhanced capabilities for sharing business process models. With the 6.0.2 version you are enabled to share areas of interest from your Business Modeler projects through copy and paste into tools such as Microsoft® PowerPoint, Visio or Word for simple process sharing. You also have the flexibility to export the analysis from Business Modeler Static and Dynamic analysis functionality in XML format, which greatly extends your ability to import the data to products supporting XML import.
For more robust reports and sharing functionality, Business Modeler V 6.0.2 has enhanced the report templates capability that can be generated from your process models. This provides greater flexibility for customization of those reports that leverage the intrinsic value of Business Modeler. These reports can be generated in Adobe® PDF format as well as leverage your existing Crystal Reports® infrastructure.
These capabilities allow Business Analysts to work in a rapid design environment and generate scheduled reports for review. In Business Modeler V 6.0.2 reports, you can:
- Define and apply header or footer masters that can be applied to report templates
- Define global parameters to multiple reports, including a company name or logo
- Sort fields in the WebSphere Business Modeler report designer to produce better structured reports
- Easy to read format data for date, duration, currency, integers, doubles, percentage and Boolean.
- Leverage improved accessibility to attribute views that provide the data for your customized reports
Beyond reporting, the Business Modeler Publishing Server V 6.0.2 provides online interaction to refine and review business models to accelerate external input to improve models. See the section New features in WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server V6.0.2 for more on details
New features in the simulation engine
A key feature of WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced is the simulation engine. The simulation engine analyzes details provided for a business process and executes a simulation execution of that model. Through your provided cost, duration and other relevant attributes for a model, the simulation engine executes the analysis of the model and provides detailed results for the simulation. The simulation engine demonstrates to the user what happens to this business process model if run with certain inputs, constraints, and resources. The simulation engine identifies potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies that the design team may want to address
In Business Modeler V 6.0.2 Simulation you can:
- Execute simulations in a swimlane view
- Leverage enhanced validation including the detection of missing stop nodes for ending paths of a model
- View detailed drill down aggregation of data for simulation analysis
- View resource working duration attributes in simulation results. If resources are not available during operating times of the process model, those results will be conveyed in the total duration of a process.
New features for defining interest areas for business process monitoring
WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced also helps bring your business process models into the SOA development effort through a restructuring of the business measures designer. If the business processes you have designed are intended to be the roadmap for a technical implementation (such as executing in a process engine like WebSphere Process Server), your Business Analysts can define metrics to measure against for performance and service level agreement requirements. In version 6.0.2, you can quickly and easily define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics associated with a business process.
The business measures designer that is available in WebSphere Business Modeler Advanced provides an easy to use, business friendly interface that raises the level of abstraction to allow for easy descriptions and placement for metrics related to KPIs. This abstraction provides a roadmap for the technical counterpart to define the aggregation details of data as it flows through the runtime implementation of you business processes.
With the new business measures designer the complexity of defining how to monitor is released from the Business Analyst role. This frees the Business Analyst to define the higher level requirements for monitoring and a greater ability to choose how those measurements are displayed in Business Monitor.
New features in WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server V6.0.2
Assembling your business process models in Business Modeler gives your Business Analysts advanced capability to design and define accurate models. For most organizations, a key part of the lifecycle for advancing business models is collaboration outside of the immediate analyst environment. Extending the work captured in Business Modeler to the subject matter experts and to the line of business is vital to the agreement and improvement on critical business processes. IBM WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server provides a secure, thin client interface to share and elicit feedback on those models. The Business Modeler Publishing Server V6.0.2 enables your organization to collaborate across multiple groups that could be geographically dispersed and have a range of skills that compliment the business process modeling efforts. This is accomplished without having to install Business Modeler on those individuals desktops.
In Publishing Server V 6.0.2 the enhancements include:
- The ability to view models in a swimlane arrangement
- Support for the Linux platform
- Hyperlink functionality for URLs in published models
- Capability to add attachments at the same time as adding a comment to a process or process element viewed in WebSphere Business Modeler Publishing Server
- Improved messaging to individuals that do not have authorization to restricted administrative functions
Version 6.0.2 of the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler provides key enhancements to usability and the ability to analyze your business processes; offering a powerful solution to your business process modeling needs. With an easy to use interface, ability to import existing Microsoft Visio diagrams, click and drop drawing functionality, and immediate access to detailed attribute information (resources, cost, and duration among others) Business Modeler enables you to easily build sophisticated business models.
When you use Business Modeler V 6.0,2 in conjunction with WebSphere Business Monitor V 6.0.2, you continue to refine the understanding of those business processes as they execute in the real world, which includes simulation of those processes with real process execution statistics provided by WebSphere Business Monitor. For more information on WebSphere Business Monitor v 6.0.2, see the article listed in the resources section of this article.
Learn
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IBM's Business Consulting Services 2006 Global CEO Study
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Business Modeler website
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What's new in WebSphere Business Monitor V6.0.2?
Get products and technologies
Jonathan D. Michaelson is the IBM World Wide Technical Sales Leader for WebSphere Business Modeler. He has a background in business analysis and design as well as JAVA development for the past eight years with IBM. Located out of the Central Region United States he supports customers and IBM technical sales world wide for WebSphere Business Modeler (Basic, Advanced and Publishing Server). You can reach Jonathan at jonmich1@us.ibm.com.
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