WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations Reference guide. Integrate business processes across your company and beyond.

Transcription

1 WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations Reference guide Integrate business processes across your company and beyond. February 2004

2 Responding to business challenges through integration From tactical needs to strategic initiatives, your company faces a wide variety of challenges that can only be met through business process integration connecting your company s people, processes and information. You need a way to make your manufacturing, finance, services or sales organization work more smoothly at every level. Business integration can help increase collaboration and get team members working together more efficiently. An IT manager may want to use integration software that supports the latest technologies and standards to extend one or more of your group s applications to other divisions within the company or to trading partners over the Internet. A business analyst may be concerned with obtaining consistent information across a division or your entire enterprise so that decisions are based on up-to-the-minute data. A chief information officer may need automated processes and enterprise-wide information management on a single platform to minimize maintenance costs. Sales representatives in the field may want to quickly access information, such as inventory amounts or the status of an order, to better serve clients and distinguish themselves from the competition. IBM s comprehensive business integration portfolio provides six essential capabilities to help you respond rapidly to changing business requirements, as shown in Figure 1. It enables you to: Model business functions and processes. Transform applications, processes and data. Integrate islands of applications, processes and information. Interact with resources anytime, anywhere with any device. Manage performance against business objectives. Accelerate the implementation of intelligent processes. Position your organization for future growth Your IT systems, business applications and employees are the backbone of your business. But your extended enterprise suppliers, distributors, retail outlets also plays a critical role in your daily operations. With a comprehensive enterprise integration solution, you get tools, technologies and best practices to create automated business processes that link these related entities and manage them as one helping you respond proactively to changing business needs. Figure 1. The IBM business integration portfolio delivers a full range of enterprise integration capabilities. 2

3 IBM s business integration solutions provide you with an enterprise-wide integration solution that supports a flexible, service-oriented, decentralized IT infrastructure making critical information and IT functions consistently available throughout your enterprise. It provides maximum business agility, freeing you from hard-wiring an inflexible solution that will require manual, time-consuming maintenance in the future. With IBM s business integration software, you have a robust business-process integration solution that covers the spectrum of integration challenges across departments and job functions. As part of IBM s business integration portfolio, the IBM WebSphere Business Integration family of offerings delivers process integration that can help maximize your company s flexibility and effectiveness. This technology helps you coordinate individuals, applications and information into high-value business processes. Accelerate integration projects Although WebSphere Business Integration Server is the engine for business-process integration, by itself, it has no instructions for performing specific tasks. This missing business-process logic can be developed from the ground up for unique situations using the tools included with WebSphere Business Integration Server. Or you can start with IBM s prebuilt, customizable, business-process templates, called IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations, to address your unique needs. IBM offers a wide range of collaboration templates based on industry standards and best practices. Jump-starting your business integration projects with WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations can help decrease costs, minimize risk and accelerate time to realized business value. Collaborations help support new ways of doing business by separating your business processes from the applications used to perform them maximizing your ability to reuse existing assets and giving your systems more flexibility. Collaborations contain logic that describes a distributed business process. Different collaborations exist for different fundamental business processes. For example, a CustomerSync collaboration helps ensure that when you add a new customer to one application, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) system, that customer s information is automatically added to other applications, as illustrated in Figure 2. Data is exchanged through collaborations in the form of business objects with the help of IBM WebSphere Business Integration Adapters. Business objects are the messages used by WebSphere business integration software for exchanging data. 3

4 WebSphere InterChange Server CRM application 1 CRM 2 adapter Sales order 6 7 ERP adapter 4,6 7 ERP application Customer Figure 2. A sales-order collaboration helps ensure that an order entered into the CRM system is automatically created in other enterprise systems. Figure 2 shows an example of how WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations work to process a typical sales order. A new sales order is created in a CRM application, which triggers the sales-order collaboration process. The application-specific business object is transformed into a generic business object that can be manipulated by the collaboration (steps 1 and 2). Before sending the generic sales-order business object to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, the salesorder process can be configured to check to see if the customer already exists in the ERP application (step 3 and 4). If the customer record doesn t exist, the sales-order collaboration can be configured to either terminate the sales-order process or to create a new customer record on the ERP system prior to processing the sales order (step 5). Assuming in this scenario that the customer entry does already exist on the ERP system, the sales-order collaboration then maps the sales order generic business object into the ERP-specific business object before sending it to the ERP application (step 6). As soon as the sales order is successfully entered in the ERP system, a confirmation message is sent back to the sales-order collaboration (step 7) along with the ERP system s sales order and line numbers so that the appropriate key referencing data is updated for later reference by all relevant applications. IBM has simplified and streamlined its collaboration portfolio by consolidating dozens of individual offerings into functional groups. As a result, you can now identify your businessprocess integration issue, select a group of industry-specific or cross-industry collaborations that address this problem and then use any or all the collaborations in this group to accelerate your ability to build a solution. Thirteen functional collaboration groups are available to handle simple tasks as well as much more detailed processes. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations can help you accelerate your integration efforts by helping you leverage established best practices rather than allocating resources to build alreadycreated common processes. 4

5 IBM provides easy-to-use, graphical tools to customize collaborations. These same tools can also be used to construct new collaborations from the ground up. New collaborations will be listed online as they become available. For the latest information on collaborations, visit ibm.com/websphere/integration/wbicollaborations. The thirteen functional groups for WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations include: WebSphere Business Integration Collaboration Foundation This offering speeds the development of custom, user-defined collaborations by providing a base development framework for common WebSphere Business Integration functions like synchronization, validation, error handling, event filtering, dynamic process control (verb conversion), in-process data transformation (callmap) and compensation. WebSphere Business Integration Collaboration Foundation provides a standardized approach for developing custom collaborations that can help ease your maintenance cost. You can use the WebSphere Business Integration Collaboration Foundation template to build as many custom collaborations as you need, helping you achieve a faster return on your investment. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Procurement includes the following business-process BOM manager Inventory-level manager Inventory movement Purchasing Vendor manager IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Customer Relationship Management This offering helps you maintain productive, professional relationships with customers by ensuring that fundamental customer and vendor data, including their financial standing, remains current and consistent between front-end and backend applications and systems. By automating the synchronization processes, you can realize the benefits of having a unified view of your customer touchpoints, such as billing and order management. Doing so can help improve customer satisfaction. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Customer Relationship Management includes the following businessprocess IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Procurement This offering helps speed the purchasing process by synchronizing procurement-related information such as inventory levels, bills of material (BOMs), vendor information and purchase orders across ERP, supply chain management (SCM) and customer interaction management systems. These functions can help reduce inventory costs and errors and enable just-intime inventory and procurement functions. Contact manager Contract synchronization Customer credit manager Customer manager Installed product Billing inquiry Vendor manager 5

6 IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Order Management This offering helps mitigate the time and cost necessary to accept and fulfill orders by synchronizing order-related information across relevant enterprise systems like ERP systems (sales and distribution, warehouse management and billing) and customer interaction management systems (quote management, order entry and order status). Automating these processes helps ensure that pricing, lead-time, billing, delivery, returned-products and customer information remains current and consistent from one application to another, significantly reducing your costs. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Order Management includes the following business-process Available to promise (ATP) to sales order ATP Item manager Price-list manager Sales-order processing Order-billing status Order-delivery status Order status Return-billing status Return-delivery status Return status Contact manager Customer manager Trading-partner order management IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Financials and Human Resources This offering helps simplify routine and end-of-period processes by synchronizing financial transaction and account movements, like invoices, payroll and accounting ledger information across relevant back-end ERP systems. Automating these financial and human resources tasks helps to ensure that accounting and employee information is current and consistent between linked applications. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Financials and Human Resources includes the following business-process Accounts receivable invoice synchronization General ledger movement Invoice generation Department manager Employee manager IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Life Insurance This offering helps life insurance companies to automate common processes like processing and responding to requests for a new policy, checking records to determine proper responses and notifying clients of quote status. For example, clients can submit either a request to partially surrender the value of an existing life policy or to add a new one through a browser-based interface. The company s back-end systems process and update the information, then generate and transmit an appropriate response to the client. Automating these processes can help reduce policy and claim administration costs considerably. 6

7 WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Life Insurance includes the following business-process Traditional life policy addition Partial withdrawal surrender quote IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Property and Casualty Insurance This offering helps property and casualty insurance companies to automate common processes like generating a notice of a claim, providing responses after a claim has been submitted, determining the appropriate coverage quote and responding to requests for additional coverage. The insurance company s back-end systems receive input through a Web-based interface for either a claim against an existing policy or a request for an additional quote and automatically return the proper response, significantly reducing policy and claim administration costs. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Property and Casualty Insurance includes the following businessprocess Homeowner first loss Personal articles coverage quote IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Telecommunications This offering helps telecommunications companies automate a wide variety of common processes like subscription and enrollment, configuration, service activation, fulfillment, assurance, billing and customer product-offering life-cycle management. A company can integrate business-support and operations-support systems and rapidly provision new services like digital subscriber lines (DSLs), wireless and other Internet Protocol (IP) services, significantly reducing telecommunications administration costs. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Telecommunications includes the following businessprocess Product development and retirement Customer order handling Customer service configuration and activation Resource provisioning and allocation Customer billing management Customer problem handling Fault resolution Service usage Service order management Product catalog Customer account manager IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for UCCnet Item Synchronization This offering helps retail suppliers synchronize product information with the UCCnet Global Registry to comply with UCCnet Services standards. This compliance helps suppliers maintain the consistency of item information and to communicate new or changed information to subscribing trading partners in the UCCnet Global Registry. 7

8 WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for UCCnet Item Synchronization includes the following businessprocess UCCnet_ItemSync UCCnet_requestWorklist UCCnet_processWorklist CIN_CIP_Dispatcher ItemCommandRouter Notify_by_ IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for UCCnet Message Manager This offering helps retailers integrate and automate the receiving, processing and sending of messages between back-end systems and UCCnet Services. Automating these communications streamlines the process for receiving XML data from the UCCnet Services standard product registry, for initiating processing of this data and for sending responses back to UCCnet Services. It also helps reduce retailers expenses and errors. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for UCCnet Message Manager includes the following businessprocess UCCnetMessageReceive UCCnetMessageSend IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Product Information Management This offering helps retailers integrate and automate the sending and receiving of item data between back-end systems and UCCnet Services. Retailers can validate item data to ensure it meets the retailer s standards and manage the itemapproval process. They can also manage the processes used to temporarily store, update, retrieve and delete item data during the item review and approval processes, send notifications for various processing results and error conditions, and publish approved item data to other enterprise systems. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Product Information Management includes the following businessprocess ItemValidation ItemDispatcher ItemCollector ProcessReviewedItem Role DataStore ItemStore MessageStore IdentifierStore 8

9 WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for HIPAA Transactions This offering helps health insurance payers comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements related to payments, inquiries and invoices. Along with WebSphere Data Interchange and available transformation maps, insurance companies can use these collaborations to meet relevant standards mandated by law, ensure privacy and security, connect disparate payer and provider system networks, and reduce claims-processing costs as part of the end-to-end HIPAA solution. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for HIPAA Transactions includes the following businessprocess Payer perspective Provider perspective Store collaborations for payer and provider IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Healthcare This offering helps healthcare companies automate static compliance reporting, patient electronic medical records (EMRs) and cascading orders to facilitate integration of new, leading-edge applications with existing Health Level Seven (HL-7) legacy systems. WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations for Healthcare includes the following business-process Compliance reporting Electronic medical records Cascading orders Integrating business processes adds business value WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations provide an ideal way to help you accelerate the return on investment (ROI) in your business integration projects. With WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations, you can choose from a comprehensive group of prebuilt collaboration templates and customize them to suit your unique needs. These prebuilt collaboration templates can help you reduce the time, expense and risk associated with creating the common solution portions that can be very similar from one company to the next. Instead, you can focus on the unique aspects of both your industry and your business processes, and customize your solution on that basis. For more information To learn more about how IBM WebSphere Business Integration Collaborations can help integrate and connect your business processes, visit: ibm.com/websphere/integration/wbicollaborations 9

10 Copyright IBM Corporation 2004 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America All Rights Reserved The e-business logo, IBM, the IBM logo and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. G