How Services Work with Business Processes

The system architecture centers around the execution of individual services according to your business 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.

Business processes can be started in different ways:

According to a user-defined schedule
By bootstrapping - in response to an activity, such as an FTP transfer of a file to the system
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 the system.
Adapters call third-party applications to perform activities outside of the system.
BPML 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, the system 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.