B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

140 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
as defined in the process design. The process execution engine manages
a set of installed processes and coordinates their execution, thereby
integrating applications and operations irrespective of the underlying
platform. It interacts with the B2B integration server to exchange
information with applications, control execution of individual steps and
state transitions for running processes. All its actions are persistently
logged to the database so that the users can analyze the data through a
reporting tool.
Since B2B applications may involve heavy loads, the execution
engine should be able to manage a large pool of concurrently running
processes. In addition, it should provide checkpoint/restart capabilities
that enable recovery from system failures.
Process administration tool
This tool provides administration functionalities to the users to monitor
the state of processes and act in the event of exceptions, such as
changing the execution sequence.
Process reporting tool
The process reporting tool may be included in the administration tool or
may be provided as an independent component of BPM system. This
tool is responsible for generating and presenting different reports such
as statistics and performance which help companies to optimize processes
by removing any bottlenecks.
A BPM system should functionally provide the following:
Support for open standards
Since B2Bi requires integration of processes across corporate boundaries
using exchange of XML-based documents or messages, the vocabulary
used for communication between different systems should be based on
open standards. The BPM system should support all the leading XML
standards which define the vocabulary and/or the business processes,
for instance, RosettaNet for electronic component industry and OBI for
purchase management.