Business Process Flow

Sterling B2B Integrator architecture centers around the execution of individual services according to your process models.

At the core of the system architecture is the integration engine, which executes the services and adapters needed to achieve your business goals and enable visibility into processing activity. Each step in a process model either initiates an activity in the process flow, is initiated and runs during a process flow, or ends a process flow.

Sterling B2B Integrator may start business processes in different ways:

• According to a user-defined schedule
• In response to an activity, such as the placement of a file into a specified folder (you can configure a single input adapter in Sterling B2B Integrator to work outside of a business process and to dynamically select the appropriate process to start when it receives a file)
• A user manually starts a process

At each step in a business process, the integration engine calls the indicated service and one of the following ensues:

• Services run within Sterling B2B Integrator.
• Adapters call third-party applications to perform activities outside of Sterling B2B Integrator.
• BMPL activities configured in the business process model provide instructions to the integration engine regarding the process flow, such as start and stop, assign a specified value in the process data, run specified activities simultaneously, and so forth.

When an activity completes, the integration engine progresses to the next step in the business process.

At each step in a business process, Sterling B2B Integrator saves a copy of work flow context (WFC) data, which records the state of the business process from service to service. The WFC contains the document being manipulated by the business process and is where each service reports any errors.