How reporting works in IBM BPM

Learn how product components interact to generate and display reports.

Interact with IBM® BPM as follows to create customized reports:

In Process Designer, define the variables that you want to track and then send tracking definitions to the Business Performance Data Warehouse.

The Business Performance Data Warehouse creates a database table to hold the tracked data.
Run instances of your processes on the Process Center Server or a Process Server in a runtime environment.
The Business Performance Data Warehouse retrieves tracked data for each variable from the Process Center Server or Process Server at regular intervals.
Create reports in the Designer that query the Performance Data Warehouse to retrieve the required data.
Reports that you define in the Designer display as scoreboards in Process Portal or a customized portal.

You can also query the Performance Data Warehouse from third-party tools like Microsoft Access to generate reports.

The following image illustrates the preceding interaction:

This diagram shows how the product components interact to store and use data for configured reports.

How IBM BPM transfers tracked data

Send tracking definitions to the Business Performance Data Warehouse from Process Designer, and start to run instances of your process, the Performance Data Warehouse retrieves tracked data from the Process Center Server or Process Server at regular intervals.

IBM BPM generates and transfers tracked data as follows:

When a process participant accesses a task that is part of the process or a system involved in the process generates an event, the Process Server creates the tracked data. The tracked data can include runtime values for the fields in a Tracking Group, values for a Timing Interval, or variables whose values are autotracked.
The Process Server writes the tracked data to the Process Server database.
The Business Performance Data Warehouse polls the Process Server database at configurable intervals, checking for a batch of data that is ready to be transferred.
In a single transaction, the Business Performance Data Warehouse marks the data in the Process Server database as transferred (locking it to prevent any further updates), loads the data from the Process Server database to the Business Performance Data Warehouse database, and then deletes the transfer records from the Process Server database.