Getting Started With Oracle BPM 11g

In a previous blog post I wrote a step by step guide on how to install Oracle BPM 11g. That was all good and well, but now what? The first thing I would suggest you do is go and by the book Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 – A Hands-On Tutorial. Read that book cover to cover and go through the labs. It provides very good information and a great sample application that you build from scratch throughout the book. If you’re like me and you want to first play with the software a little bit before you go reading a 500 and some-odd page book, Oracle allows you download the same application that you create in the book.

To download the sample application, go to:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpm/learnmore/index.html

Browse down to the Samples and Demos section for the link. The sample application is called the Sales Quote Demo and is a BPM process where sales people enter in a quote into the process system, have the quote go through approvals and reviews, perform some automated routing, and finalize the quote.

Once you download the sample application and unzip it there are two documents to help you set up and run it. The first doc is the ‘Setup Instructions’, it takes you step by step through prepping your environment for the application. It walks you through the steps of creating your schema, setting up the WebLogic server, seeding the LDAP, connecting JDeveloper (or BPM studio if you prefer) to the MDS, deploying the project, setting up the groups, and mapping the LDAP users to the process roles. The guide is very good and I didn’t have any problems following through it step by step and deploying the application.

The second document is the ‘Understand and Run’ guide. This document has two sections. The first section goes through the process design and describes the logic behind it. The second section walks you through actually running the application and the end-user experience. Just like the Setup document, this guide is pretty straightforward and easy to follow. Unlike the Setup document, when you go through this guide you actually learn a little bit about Oracle BPM 11g and how it works.

Downloading the Sales Quote Demo and deploying it isn’t a replacement for reading the book I mentioned above or going to a training course, but it is a very good jumping off point. If you like dry reads you can download the various guides that Oracle has for BPM. The guides are all located at:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17904_01/nav/portal_booklist.htm

The guides are actually invaluable and for Oracle BPM 11g I would recommend downloading the following and putting them into your library:

• Quick Installation Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
• Installation Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
• Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management
• Administrator’s Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
• User’s Guide for Oracle Business Rules
• Business Process Composer User’s Guide for Oracle Business Process Management
• User’s Guide for Oracle Business Process Management

Going through these steps, setting up the Sales Quote Demo application, and reviewing it is a great way to start off learning BPM and I highly suggest it. Good luck!

 

John Linehan

ImageSource, Inc.

www.imagesourceinc.com

Fusion Middleware Patchset 5 in the Wild

Oracle slipped out the fifth patchset release for the Fusion Middleware products during the middle of the night on the 22nd of February.  For the most part things will be very familiar to longtime users.  One of the most visible changes is that the branding has caught up with the software.  Oracle Content Server is now Webcenter Content,  Imaging and Process Management is now Webcenter Imaging.  It feels like an end of an era!

ImageSource has a customer that was entering an upgrade project for their Fusion Middleware based solution.  After two surprisingly easy days I got their development and test environments up and running with this new release.  Oracle has stated this released isn’t focused on adding lots of new features but they have rolled up a lot of bug fixes and patches that previously had to be installed separately into this release.  This is by far the best release of this platform ever.

That’s not to say Oracle didn’t sneak in some great new features.  Folks who haven’t got to try out the Oracle Business Process Management feature back in PR4 will find huge improvements in this release.  One of the Webcenter Imaging additions I appreciate is a built-in configuration editor for any Oracle solution accelerators installed in the environment.  Most folks probably haven’t had to work with those much but as one of the few who have let me tell you it’s a breath of fresh air to start seeing official Oracle tooling support and documentation for those things.

The folks at AMIS have a good write up with lots of reference links and general impressions of the release.  All in all,  I’m really excited to see what the future brings.  Oracle has come a long way since the initial release of the 11g platform as a whole.  Even from PS2 this seems like lightyears ahead.

Les Harris
Systems Engineer
ImageSource, Inc.

Features in ILINX Capture (Part I)

The feature set in ILINX Capture is vast and it can be a drag reviewing and interpreting feature lists in software documentation.  Those of you not familiar with ILINX Capture can visit the following website www.ilinxcapture.com, or feel free to leave a comment and we can provide additional information and/or a hands-on demonstration.  In short, ILINX Capture is a web based capture platform that excels in distributed capture and custom capture workflow environments.  It is scalable to work on a single workstation or it can be extended to an enterprise wide global standard for capture in your organization.

I wanted to use this post to touch on a couple of the features that I see being used more and more in ILINX Capture.  These features became part of the product based on customer feedback, industry direction, and internal vision for the product.  All of the following features can be added to any point in your process flow map, so it provides not only the functionality but also the flexibility to adapt to the business needs of current processes in place today.

1. 2D Barcode Support   – This feature adds the ability to read metadata, classify and separate documents, and provide quality control checks through the recognition of 2D barcodes.  Through a GUI the user has the ability to parse the barcode data and map it to fields, separate and identify the type of document, and validate that the number of pages in the document match what was captured through the scanning or electronic import process. 
2. Web Service Integration  – This feature provides ILINX Capture with the ability to integrate with any existing web service.  Most commonly, we see this used to perform database lookups or validations against existing line of business systems.  Another way this is being utilized is to interact with different organization processes, for example, you can create a support ticket in an organization’s support system every time a process exception occurs in their fully automated capture workflow.
3. Queue Thresholds & Triggers – Work queues in ILINX Capture are areas where human interaction is required to process data or documents through the workflow.  The thresholds and triggers provide the ability to monitor the batches or documents in a queue and execute a function when a threshold or trigger is met.  This is useful to monitor escalations or the processing of high priority documents.  For example, if a fax comes in to the system for an auto loan or stock trade, in most cases, this is a time sensitive process that needs to move rapidly through the workflow.  Between the notification features and the thresholds/triggers, ILINX Capture can ensure that 1) a user is notified that there is high priority work to process, 2) the documents are processed within a defined time frame, and 3) if the documents are not processed the system can notify a manager or route the documents to another user group.

These are just a few of the features that have been added to extend the functionality of this product.  Stay tuned to this blog for additional information on other features that help shape this product to provide value to its customer community. 

Ryan Keller

ImageSource, Inc.

Oracle Content Management – IPM 11g Links

Looking for some useful links to information about installing Oracle IPM 11g?  We have been performing successful Oracle IPM 11g implementations and will be providing useful information, as well as, tips and tricks on this blog.

Here are the main links that have been leveraging for some valuable information related to this next generation ECM Suite:

Oracle Content Management Description	URL
Overview	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/content-management/overview/index.html
Downloads	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/content-management/downloads/index.html
Documentation	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/content-management/documentation/index.html
UCM 11g Downloads	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/content-management/downloads/index-085241.html
IPM 11g Downloads	http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/content-management/downloads/index-ipm-088963.html

Ryan Keller

ImageSource, Inc.

Nexus 2010

I recently attended the Technology conference put on by my company. Nexus®, as it is dubbed, is where we try to bring in all the local and national minds in our ECM space together. On the vendor side we had both hardware and software manufacturers represented. On the standards side we had credits offered for PMI, ARMA, AHIMA, and IAPP just by attending. There was pre-conference training on  Oracle I/PM 11g, a risk management course, and an AIIM ECMp course. For the user community we had attendees from Fortune 50 companies  down to small government agencies and everything in between. Sounds great right? It was.

As with any conference, you have to make it to the break out session that relate to you, and make connections with people that you can relate to. The latter was easy of course, we are all living and breathing the ECM world. Even if your content is different, the pain points are nearly always the same. It’s great to connect with others and find out their resolutions to similar issues, their approach to common problems, and to hear their success stories. Besides giving a presentation on our product ILINX® Integrate (something I have blogged about in the past), I also attended sessions on advanced document capture, ILINX Content Store, Oracle I/PM, and sessions on project management.

The breakout sessions had real value for me. The sharing of knowledge is essentially what Nexus is all about and the break outs are core to that. In years past, I have attended Nexus but allowed myself to do project work or provide technical support for the conference itself during the breakout sessions. This year I made it a point to attend as many sessions as possible and only missed two. I am confident I took the right approach.

I attended Shon Mueller’s presentation on advanced capture solutions and it was great. He was dynamic and brought a wealth of experience in his years at Kofax, ImagesSource, and other ECM technology companies. Jon Sutherland’s presentation on ILINX Content Store was informative for me as well. As a system’s engineer that’s busy in the field I haven’t had as much time as would like to work with our latest product offering. ILINX Content Store is a real solution for content management and I am quite confident we will see and hear more about it. Les Harris’ session on upgrading to Oracle I/PM 11g was an eye opener. I have worked extensively with the I/PM product line for many years and the new product accomplishes the same functions as all previous versions, but with an entirely new architecture. For those planning on sticking with the product it is time to start planning your upgrade path now. I also attended a session on project management in which Dennis Brooke discussed how to use Web 2.0 technologies to streamline project management and enhance project morale. The session sparked lots of questions form the audience and I could see the wheels turning as people thought how they could use these ideas in their own corporate structure. I worked with Dennis for many years and it was great to hear about some of the lessons learned and successes.

I have linked to all the presentations, please feel free to review them and all the other’s on the Nexus site.  All in all Nexus 2010 was a success and I can’t wait to see what ImageSource puts together for next year.

  

Abbyy FlexiCapture For Transcript Processing – A More Detailed Review

Last time we took a look at the Abbyy FlexiCapture product to perform College Transcript processing in a broad overview.  This time I would like to start looking at some lower level details of the product that show where FlexiLayouts end and Project Level Document Definitions begin.

Let’s start with some basic definitions.  A Layout is used to help the Recognition Engine to identify the document in a batch as belonging to a particular Document Definition.   A Layout is also used to help the Recognition Engine to find the locations of the data to extract and place in fields the user can then see and modify if necessary.  A Document Definition is used to determine the type of processing to perform on the document, the fields contained in the document and the type of data those fields should have.

Now for some details on the FlexiLayout Design Studio.  The studio can load a sample image or document to OCR the image and allow the designer to start identifying specific locations on the image to find OCR data elements like text, separator lines, white space, or pictures.  These identified elements can then be used to locate data locations to extract information to be used for the field data.  The field data can be either single fields or table fields and can be specified as repeatable if they occur more than once.  In the case of a Transcript, field data locations for Student Name, Date of Birth and Student Identifier are usually single fields located near the top of a page.  Field data like Sessions and Course information are more likely to be a table of fields that are repeating on the page.  In attempting to capture this data into the correct field a fixed identifier like Static Text must be used to limit the search for the actual data to a specific region.  For something like Student Name it might be a static text label to the left of the name of the student that can then be used to anchor where the name of the student is located.  Once the anchor is found, then the field definition for the name of the student can be determined from the relationship of where the anchor is located to where the name of the student is located by using an x and y offset from the anchor location to draw a box around the information to extract.  These same types of steps are used to locate the data to extract for all the other fields to capture from the image including the table fields.

Now that the layout identifies the location of the fields to extract data, it is transferred over and serves as the basis for a Document Definition.  The fields identified in the layout are created in the Document Definition with the same names and data types from the layout.  At this point, you can use the Document Definition as is or modify it to add additional fields and or data validation scripts.  This turns out to be a very useful feature since not all transcripts contain exactly the same data, but to release this data to a backend system or database does require some consistency in the names of the fields and their types.  So if one Document Definition for a transcript has the Student SSN, then all Document Definitions for other transcripts should have a Student SSN even if the actual transcript image does not contain such a value.

In addition, data validation scripts written in either VB or Java can correct the data the Recognition Engine extracts so the operator does not have to perform this work.  For example, when reading the Course data for Units Attempted the value read should be 3.00 but in a lot of cases is read as 3. 00 with a space in the middle.  A data validation script can be written to automatically remove the space to get to the correct value.  A data validation script can also help to split up a field into multiple values.  For instance the Student Name is most likely defined as a single field that contains the whole name of the student.  But many backend systems or database like to have the name broken down into its parts like First Name, Middle Name and Last Name.  Therefore a data validation script can be written to split the name into its parts and assign the data to the separate fields.

Again we have only just started to scratch the surface of the capabilities and features of the Abbyy FlexiCapture product.  To really get a feel for this product requires a week long training course that is way beyond this blog.  If you have any interest in how this product can help you then by all means contact an ImageSource Sales Representative through our web site at www.imagesourceinc.com

  

Oracle IPM 11g Released!

For those of you who have not heard Oracle has released the next generation of their Enterprise Content Management Software, Imaging and Process Management (IPM) 11g.  This version is the first major step that Oracle has taken to tightly integrate the product into Oracle’s overall software architecture…IPM 11g has been completely overhauled to be part of the Fusion Middleware (FMW) tech stack.  From the ECM perspective, Oracle now has a complete seamlessly integrated end to end offering that includes the storage repository, document management, business process management, library services, web publishing, records management, reporting/monitoring and application integration.  This creates many advantages for customers that use or plan to use other Oracle products in their workplace, as well as, integrating and leveraging existing investments in non-Oracle software.

I have been working as a Systems Engineer and Project Manager with the IPM software base for over 8 years, through the Stellent IBPM acquisition, all the way back to the Optika Acorde and eMedia days.  A couple major differences in implementing the latest Oracle 11g version are the requirements for Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM) for the storage repository and Oracle WebLogic Server for the application/web server.  I look at both of these requirements in a positive light.  UCM and WebLogic Server are powerful robust products that provide standard approaches to managing content storage and applications, respectively, from the FMW perspective.  With that said, if you do not have experience with either UCM or WebLogic, you will need to get up to speed with them to succeed in an IPM implementation.  Neither of these products can be installed through the “Next, Next, Next, Finished!” approach, so careful upfront planning and architecting is required to ensure a successful implementation. 

Let’s talk about the new user interface a little bit.  Oracle has followed suit with the rest of the major players in the ECM world by creating a complete web based interface for performing all administrative and end user functions.  This makes administration duties of the system much easier than in past versions that require administration to be done through the “thick” client.  Also, by moving to the WebLogic Server the full featured web interface is now much more browser agnostic than in the past.  The image viewer comes in two flavors that support over 400 file formats; a zero footprint view only version and the a re-written java applet that allows for full annotations, annotation security, and server based conversion/rendering for access speed.  The following are a couple of screen captures of the user interface from IPM 11g:

The Client Interface

The Zero Footprint Viewer

The Java Applet Viewer

Lastly, I would like to touch on a feature that is often overlooked when implementing ECM solutions, application integration. Oracle has done a great job in IPM 11g to provide some powerful capabilities for leveraging investments into Oracle and non-Oracle applications through integration.  For a process where users are assigning metadata to a record in their business application, through application integration this data can be pushed to and associated with the document stored in IPM 11g. Another example of integration would be the image enablement of a business application.  In this case a user could be accessing records in their ERP system a hotkey, menu item, or button in the application screen can retrieve and display the document from IPM without the user ever having to leave their business application.  These capabilities can create significant efficiencies in an organization through increased user productivity, the reduction of training and the simplification of support and administration. 

All in all I see the changes that Oracle made in IPM 11g as great additions to an already strong platform.  Oracle has a product that not only adheres to their architecture model, but also will provide many benefits to the customers that use it.  Stay tuned to this blog for more information related to our experiences with Oracle IPM 11g.

Ryan Keller

Project Manager

ImageSource, Inc.

  

Student Enrollment Transcript Processing

Many Colleges and Universities must handle transcripts received from other Colleges and Universities for Student Enrollment processing. The receiving College goes through several steps to process a Student Application for Enrollment and the associated transcript(s) that Application may have and those steps may require the application to pass to several different people.  Usually a folder is created to hold all the documents being received to support the Application and once all required documents are received this folder is passed on to Evaluators to evaluate the application and make an Admit or Deny decision.

 The processing of a transcript may follow different processing depending on the College.  In one case the information on the transcript is manually entered into an ERP system for Student Processing on a line by line basis.  This is very labor intensive and slows the processing of a Student’s Application.  In addition, the Evaluator must review the transcript and mark those lines that cannot be transferred, and manually add up the Units Attempted, Units Earned/Completed and calculate a GPA to see if the Student qualifies for admission.  A lot of manual processing is done on a single transcript and a single Student may have one or more transcripts from previous institutions and all have to be evaluated in the same way to determine admission to the school.

There are a couple of products available that can help to automate this Student Enrollment Processing, Oracle I/PM and ABBYY FlexiCapture.  Oracle I/PM can provide both the image storage of all the documents received and also a workflow to route the document sets through the various stages of processing electronically.  This relives the use of paper in the processing and the associated issues of losing track of documents or folders and time consuming searches to find a document.

 Since a paper transcript is different for different institutions a product that allows flexibility in processing different formats is required to read the data from the transcript and place it into similar fields that can be uploaded into an ERP system.  The ABBYY FlexiCapture product allows for the capture of information from a free format form like a transcript.  It has a module called FlexiLayout that allows the developer to specify where on a page a specific data set may reside.  It can handle table data like Session/Course data which can be repeated multiple times on a single transcript.  It can handle multiple page transcripts and multiple columns of data on a single page that continues on the next page.  This product is very flexible in the design stages to allow the developer to handle almost all the common issues when attempting to extract data from a transcript.

By using the ABBYY FlexiCapture product and releasing the extracted transcript data and the image into I/PM there are several time and labor gains to Enrollment Processing.

• Almost all manual routing of paper is eliminated.  This saves time in both the movement of folders from one desk to another and also saves time in searching for the correct folder to place newly acquired documents.
• Manual Line by Line data entry of transcripts is reduced.  Even with the ABBYY product some labor is still required to review the extraction results and ensure the data is correct.  However, this Validation step takes a lot less time and effort then manual line by line data entry.  The data can then be uploaded electronically into an ERP/Student Processing system.
• Since the extracted data is now in the I/PM repository it is easy to develop a form that can allow the evaluator to select the Session/Course lines to include in a Total Summary and then press a button so the totals are calculated automatically.  This sure beats the manual method of using a hand calculator.

 Using both of these products help in lowering the costs of processing Student Applications for Enrollment and the time consuming effort of transcript processing.

Accounts Payable Processing with Kofax KTM and Oracle I/PM

Every company no matter how big or small has an Accounts Payable department.  It may be as small as one person or it may have ten, fifteen or more people.  For medium and large companies there are problems that arise with the data entry of all that invoice data and the tracking of all those invoices through the approval cycle.  There have been many different methods that companies have created to try and handle both which still lead to missing/late invoices and mistakes during data entry.  Methods such as logging the invoices either in a spreadsheet or manually on paper are just some of the types of methods that companies have tried to keep track of where invoices are and how long they have been waiting to be paid.  Maybe there is a better way.

 Kofax KTM in conjunction with Oracle I/PM provides a solution to these two issues.  Kofax provides two software packages to scan and then process documents like invoices.  KTM is the processing part and is able to OCR and identify the key fields on an invoice no matter where on the page the data is located.  KTM can also validate some of the data against the ERP system the company is running. Fields like PO Number, PO Release, Vendor Name, Vendor Address, Vendor Pay Site, Vendor Payment Terms and other fields can be read from the ERP system and added to the set of data held by KTM.  KTM can then pass this data on to Oracle I/PM.

 Oracle I/PM is an imaging and workflow software package.  Not only does it store the invoice document with the index data entered through KTM, but it also has a workflow module that can track the invoice through the business process so the users can know where in the process the document is sitting.  With I/PM workflow the invoice can be routed electronically to the assigned approver for invoice approval that is done on a Form built for workflow.  If there are multiple levels that can be handled within the workflow in one of several ways depending on the information available from other systems such as the company ERP system.  In addition, I/PM workflow scripts allow a programmer to write code to transfer the data directly into the ERP system through its data import tables.  I/PM has been successfully integrated to pass data to JDE F0411Z1/F0911Z1 tables and Oracle EBS Open Interface tables to name just a few.  These code scripts are re-usable so we can quickly get them working in your environment.  Have we have found, not every company process their AP Invoices in the same manner, so each implementation we do is slightly different than any other, so we need to discover the differences and then modify the form and script code to match.

 We at ImageSource can provide the expertise and experience to quickly get an imaging and workflow process into place in your company.  Just contact us at http://www.imagesourceinc.com to find out how.

Business Process Optimization

For those of you who attended my breakout session at the NEXUS ECM Conference on automating business processes this topic will be familiar to you.  If you missed the session, this blog will provide a glimpse into the world of automating and optimizing business processes. 

There are many different ways to approach process automation and optimization and the purpose of this blog topic is to provide information based on my industry experience.  I will discuss identifying processes within an organization and then automating those processes utilizing a number of valuable implementation strategies.

Why Automate?

From my experience in the Enterprise Content Management industry, I have found the main reasons to automate or optimize a business process are as follows:

• Gain Process Efficiencies
• Process Quality Improvement
• Improve Reporting, Tracking & Auditing

Process Identification

Let’s take a look at identifying a business process that could be automated.  When looking at processes to automate or optimize, the starting point is to identify a process and then extensively research the process to get a clear understanding of the current state.  A good place to start with this research is to look at all of the inputs and outputs of the current process.  This can include documents, data and communication associated with accomplishing tasks in a process. 

Next, we will want to evaluate the identified process to determine what manual steps in the process can be automated.  From identifying the steps we then can determine which ones will provide the best return for the business and/or user.

The last key to identifying and evaluating business processes is the inclusion of the user community in the analysis of the current process to determine; 1) what is currently working well, 2) what could use improving, 3) what are the major deficiencies and 4) what is on the user’s wish list for the process.

By following these steps in identifying and evaluating a business process you will set yourself up for success when architecting and implementing a solution for automation or optimization.

Implementation Strategies

Now that we have discussed identifying business processes let’s take a look at some implementation strategies to assist you in automating/optimizing the process.

• Understand the Business Process: As discussed earlier in the post, it is critical to fully understand the process that you are automating.
  • Evaluate current bottlenecks
  • Determine the user interaction with the current process
• Require Ownership at All Levels: In order to get full acceptance of the solution you are implementing you should ensure that the entire team is on board and understands the benefits to them and the organization.  This includes:
  • Executive Level
  • Departmental Management
  • End Users
• Know what to Automate: Don’t automate every manual process for the sake of automation.  Determine the return value associated with the re-engineering of the process.  In some cases it will make more sense to keep the process manual.  For example, in a customer service organization, it may be more beneficial to provide human interaction to a customer instead of sending an automatically generated email.
• Educate Yourself on Existing Systems: Understanding the current infrastructure in place can be critical when determining the return on investment and initial cost of the process re-engineering. 
  • If there is already an Enterprise Content Management system in place, you should be able to leverage this for tasks associated with document capture, document management/archival, workflow, etc…
  • Line of Business systems (Oracle E-Business, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, MSFT Great Plains, etc…) can be leveraged for storing metadata associated with the documents you are capturing.   Using software like ILINX Integrate, these LOB systems can then be image enabled to retrieve documents directly from your document management system without ever leaving the LOB system.
• Promote Ongoing Analysis & Optimization: This strategy is key to creating and maintaining truly efficient and optimized processes within an organization.  Let’s take the following example:
  • A manual process is identified to automate
  • The process is automated with success using the above implementation strategies
  • Everyone is happy and uses the new and improved process
  • Now that the process has been improved it is common to call the project a success and never look back.  This may work for some time, but eventually the process will need to be evaluated again to determine if additional automation or optimization needs to take place.  Over time business processes evolve and technology changes, so this step can be imperative to keep your business process streamlined.

 In summary, we have taken a quick look at the process of identifying business process to automate and optimize, as well as, some strategies for success when taking on the task of business process re-engineering.  Please feel free to post comments related to this information or your own experiences related to this topic. 

Ryan S. Keller

Project Manager

ImageSource, Inc.