Process-based enterprise business integration solution

Process-based enterprise business integration solution

1. Status Quo Analysis of Enterprise Informatization Construction In recent years, with the development of information technology and the improvement of enterprise management, the demand for enterprise information system integration has become stronger and stronger. After several years of Enterprise Informatization Construction, enterprises often have multiple independent application systems for specific functions. This system is generally oriented to the needs of a certain department or department in an enterprise. Because the organizational structure of an enterprise is generally divided by function, therefore, the system is designed for departments, and its functions are also oriented to specific functions. In this way, there is often such a situation in the enterprise, the functional departments for their own convenient management needs, the establishment of a variety of different systems. These systems require grass-roots business personnel to log on to the system to input basic data, and each functional department staff can log on to the system for statistical analysis based on their own needs. Therefore, the grass-roots business personnel must repeat the input of different systems and even the same data in different systems; if the management personnel of various functional departments want to know other data not managed by themselves, they also have to ask the system administrator of other business systems to create a new account for themselves, for Login query. Figure 1. Functional-oriented enterprise application system architecture On the other hand, many outstanding enterprise management ideas have been accepted by more and more enterprise managers. The secrets of SCM, ERP, APS, and other advanced enterprise management ideas are gradually being uncovered and recognized by more and more enterprises. However, when these companies are ambitious to establish appropriate information systems, they have to face the same problem: how to protect their investment in existing applications, including system construction costs, business staff's experience in establishing existing systems, and so on. These separated applications isolate the relationship between services, and the originally coherent and complete business processes are damaged by humans. As business personnel are familiar with their work environments, they do not want these systems to be completely abandoned. 　　 2. Problems to be Solved in Information Integration Therefore, with the development of enterprises, enterprise application integration has gradually mentioned the schedule of enterprise information construction. In general, the problems to be solved by integration include the following: Role-oriented integration of functional systems Manages scattered businesses in a centralized manner based on the company's management philosophy Centralized data integration of scattered business data Solve the problem of information intercommunication between remote and heterogeneous systems Figure 2. Role-oriented enterprise application system architecture  3. process-based business integration solution　　 3.1 goals Establishes an enterprise business center, centrally manages business processes, and drives underlying data integration and message transmission. Establishes an enterprise data center, provides unified data interfaces for applications, and centrally distributes data of each application to achieve data sharing and avoid repeated information input. Establishes a message center for an enterprise to provide publishing/subscription or point-to-point communication mode for enterprise applications, and drives underlying data integration in the form of messages when necessary. 3.2 overall plan The improvement of enterprise management requires that the information system be able to centrally manage the enterprise's business processes from the overall perspective, the requirements must be able to quickly adapt to changes in customer needs, production capacity improvement, supplier supply capacity changes, and other factors resulting in adjustments to the production and operation processes and organizational structure of enterprises. Therefore, one of the core problems to be solved in enterprise informatization construction is how to establish an enterprise's business center so that managers can "strategize and win a thousand miles away ". Another question to be considered in enterprise informatization construction is how to integrate existing applications and new applications in a scalable and loosely coupled manner, and ensure sufficient independence between applications. This integration solution uses the infor middleware Products of zhongchuang software commercial middleware Co., Ltd. as the underlying middleware support platform. Infor middleware provides a secure, stable, scalable, and flexible infrastructure platform for reliable message communication, Component Management, and collaboration. With assistance from development facilities such as workflow middleware and report tools, infor middleware makes it possible to quickly build complex applications and easily cope with business changes. Figure 3. infor system middleware's support system for enterprise applications From application system construction and operation management to application integration, from single application construction, business data exchange to enterprise application integration, from traditional business models, web services to business process reengineering, infor middleware provides comprehensive platform support, allowing you to quickly build complex applications as needed and stand out from fierce competition. Shows the application integration solution built based on infor middleware: Figure 4. Application Integration solution based on infor Middleware 3.2.1 Business Center Application Integration is business integration first. The business center is at the core of the enterprise information system integration solution. The business center shall provide enterprises with full-lifecycle management functions such as business process modeling, management, monitoring, and analysis, and be responsible for organizing the operation process of the enterprise, coordinates the collaboration process between departments and persons, and distributes scheduling work items among business personnel. Data integration also uses the business center to determine when to extract and transfer data. The business center of this solution is implemented using the workflow middleware inforflow. Inforflow is a workflow middleware that complies with the specifications of the International Workflow Management Alliance (WfMC). It provides a basic platform for workflow automation and process application construction. Inforflow separates the process logic from the business logic to visually analyze, define, and assemble business units, so that application developers can focus more on the implementation of business logic, this reduces the difficulty of developing complex process applications. Inforflow supports a wide range of workflow models, including sequence, branch, synchronization, loop, self-loop, and signing. It supports dynamic process adjustment, allowing developers and end users to easily cope with changes, improve the flexibility and adaptability of the application system. Inforflow supports modeling of complex business processes. It uses common activities, routing activities, subprocess activities, block activities, and other activity types to perform hierarchical and intuitive modeling of the entire enterprise operation process. Inforflow supports the processing of event plug-ins, allowing applications to expand business functions at any time when the status of process instances and active instances changes. Figure 5. scalable inforflow Architecture In this solution, the data extraction interface provided by the data center and the message publishing interface provided by the message center can be implemented by the event plug-in, after implementation, plug it into a certain part of the business process. This method isolates the core business logic of each link from the data extraction and message publishing logic automatically completed by the system to support integration, in this way, the Business independence and reusability of these integrated components are realized, and the system's ability to adapt to business changes is further enhanced. In this solution, the business center provides two types of external interfaces: Xpdl Interface Xpdl is the definition language defined by WfMC for describing business processes. inforflow strictly uses this language for process modeling. Through this interface, the business center can receive the business processes defined by the external system, check the validity of the business processes, and provide a complete description of the business processes to the external system. Process Control Interface The process control interface provides the process control function in a compliant form. Applications can remotely call the workflow engine through a local call proxy to drive the actual business process. The application can use this interface to control the execution instance of the business process and trace and query the running information of the Process instance. Taking the receipt of customer orders in the customer order management as an example, the process that the business center uses tasks to drive the system to run is shown. The Business Process of customer order management is as follows: 1. Market personnel receive customer orders and enter them into the Order Management System; 2. technical personnel conduct technical analysis and make design solutions based on customer needs; 3. Market personnel make quotations based on the design plan issued by the technical personnel; 4. Market Personnel send the design scheme and quotation to the customer for confirmation and sign the contract. Figure 6. Business-driven integration policy Market personnel obtain the "Order Entry" task from the task processor and enter the order information through the "Order Management System; The order management system sends a task submission request to the workflow engine by remotely calling the proxy; The workflow engine assigns tasks to technical analysts according to the process definition; The workflow engine calls the data extraction component to extract order information from the Order Management System database and store it in the data center; The workflow engine calls the message Publishing component to publish messages to the message center; The message center sends data to the "design system message proxy" for subscribed order information "; Design the system message proxy to unpack data and convert the localized format, and store the data in the local database. It can be seen that this solution has two major features: With the workflow engine as the core, the workflow engine is used to schedule business systems and various extended components. It isolates the development of various integrated business components for integration from the core business system, so that the business system can run independently without relying on the integration platform. It also improves the reusability of the integration components independent of the business system. 3.2.2 data center Data center is one of the core of enterprise informatization construction. This function allows the data center to request data from applications, publish messages, and send data to subscribed applications. During data transmission, the data center also uses the data acquisition and sending interfaces to convert, package, and split data formats. The data center collects, publishes, and actively sends data to subscribers through certain interfaces. The data center makes enterprise data integration easy and easy, effectively avoiding the differences between application databases, at the business layer, the complicated business relationship between data providers and data subscribers is simplified. The data center serves as a bridge between applications separated from the data layer. The data center is responsible for collecting data from various enterprise applications, releasing the data, and sending it to all subscribers as appropriate, so that all departments of the enterprise can utilize the results of information integration, assists in decision making and management. In this solution, the data center needs to extract application data from each application database to the data center in point-to-point mode, and each application can subscribe to business data of interest to it, and receives the business data sent from the data center. The client programs installed on each application end can subscribe to messages, send data, and receive data. Figure 7. Publish/subscribe-based message transmission The data integration provided by the data center is based on the Enterprise Application Integration Intermediate inforeai. Inforeai uses XML message representation. Publishing/subscription-based information sharing and message routing make information sharing of business systems simple and easy to change, and can connect to heterogeneous systems and operating environments, the loose coupling between business systems enables better recovery when local system errors occur, so as to ensure higher robustness and scalability of the Data Exchange Platform. Data Extraction Data extraction refers to the process of extracting business data from the database of the application system to the data center. Data Extraction is business-driven. When a business personnel completes a specific task, the business center sends a data extraction command to the application database by configuring the data extraction component in the workflow engine as a plug-in, the specified service data is extracted and stored in the data center database by the message proxy deployed on the application end. Data Transmission Data transmission refers to the process of sending subscribed business data from the data center to the application database. Like data extraction, data transmission is also business-driven. One possible scenario is that before a business personnel processes a specific task, they must first obtain the latest business data from the data center, in this case, the component responsible for sending data can be configured as a plug-in to the moment before the workflow engine starts the activity. In this way, when the activity starts, the business center can send and store the data to the application system database by deploying the message proxy on the application end. Data transmission also involves data packaging and type conversion. Data subscription To obtain data from a data center, a client application must first subscribe to the data center to obtain the required data. The data center provides message topics that users can subscribe. 3.2.3 message center The message center provides publishing/subscription and point-to-point communication modes for enterprise applications. In this solution, the message center based on inforbus/Q is a relay Routing Mechanism for communications between enterprise applications. The communication mode can be publishing/subscription or point-to-point. Message proxy is the local proxy of the message center on the client. Business personnel can use the message proxy installed on the client to publish/subscribe to messages to the message center. After receiving a message, the message center can make the message persistent (stored in data ). After receiving a message from a client, the message center can call a service integration component. A typical scenario is that when a certain type of business personnel changes their managed plans, they need to transmit the changed data to the data center, for the data center to send data to all application systems that subscribe to this change message. In this case, the trigger of data integration events is message-driven, not task-driven. Compared with the task-driven approach, message-Driven Data Integration is a more flexible integration strategy. However, this integration policy essentially violates the undertaking relationship between businesses and is a kind of damage to standardized management. Therefore, we should try to avoid using this policy too much. Taking the customer order management process as an example, the message-triggered integration policy is shown in: Figure 8. Message-driven integration policy 3.2.4 integrated components The integration component is a type of business component for the purpose of system integration. The integration component is independent of the business system and implements message transmission, data extraction, and publishing among various business systems. The integration component helps ensure the independence between the systems to be integrated by the platform. It is an effective way to implement Application Integration in the form of loose coupling. In this solution, the following integration components are ready for development: The data extraction component initiates a data extraction command to the data center to complete the process of extracting business data from the application system database. The data publishing component initiates a command to publish data to the data center. The data center distributes the specified data to all subscribers. The message Publishing component sends a message publishing command to the message center, which completes the delivery of the message to the subscriber. In this solution, the integrated components cannot be directly called by the business system, but are automatically initiated through the Business Center (workflow engine) and message center according to the configuration. 3.3 advantages of the Solution Service-oriented integrated Bus Figure 9. Service-oriented integrated Bus The entire system is built on an enterprise information construction platform based on the Enterprise Service Bus, laying a good foundation for enterprise information construction. The platform provides all kinds of infrastructure necessary for building enterprise applications, and provides enterprises with solutions to problems that are frequently encountered in informatization construction from the technical level to the business level. The service-oriented summary structure can be easily integrated into the platform using new systems developed in the future. High scalability, convenient integration of new applications High scalability is one of the highlights of this solution. The architecture oriented to service bus allows new applications to be easily inserted into the system. You only need to independently develop new applications, and re-organize the business process through the business center to include the newly developed applications, you can use the remote call proxy and message proxy to integrate them into the entire system. Based on the component development idea, the business logic is completely separated to improve reusability The separation of process logic and business logic makes the expansion of business functions simple and clear. The integrated components deployed in the form of plug-ins are independent of the business system, these components can be reused in all aspects of the business process. Centralized management and Decentralized Control The establishment of the business center allows the management personnel to centrally manage and monitor various business processes of the enterprise, so as to conveniently complete the analysis of each link of the Business Process execution, in order to identify the bottlenecks in the business process and make improvements in a timely manner. Various functional departments are the implementing agencies of enterprise operations. They complete their business work through the functional business system distributed in each department. The entire system structure reflects the management relationships above the organizational structure of an enterprise.