Web-Service Framework for Business Process

Modelling & Legacy Systems Integration

Odysseas I. PYROVOLAKIS, Anastasia GARBI, Antonis PLATANIOTIS
EXODUS S.A., Filolaou 40, Athens, 116 33, GREECE
Tel: +30 2107564505, Fax: + 30 2107563096,
Email: {opir | angarbi | antonyp}@exodus.gr
Abstract: In today's business climate, the need to be flexible, agile and highly
responsive to market changes is leading many enterprises to rely increasingly on
novel Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Any change to business
models & business processes should be supported by the rules on how the business is
put together, and by the corresponding ability of the underlying IT infrastructure to
transparently adopt such changes and enhance business operations. Our approach,
the Enterprise Information Suite (EIS), addresses and tries to sufficiently solve the
issues of enterprise application integration and Business process modelling by
exploiting the potentials of Web Services towards the realisation of Services
Oriented Software Development that enables users to configure and interact with
applications that span across enterprises as well as through the functional borders
within one enterprise. In this paper the overall architecture and the principal
components of EIS are presented and the application of business process
management and enterprise application integration based on EIS for the Banking
sector is given.

1. Introduction
As enterprises search for cross-enterprise efficiency, greater flexibility and parallelism, they
are adopting process views that cross many functional and system boundaries. It gradually
becomes a common need for companies to realize the benefits of making business
processes accessible via the Internet by utilising extended enterprise processes.
Individual packaged applications are recognized as important process contributors, but
there is growing recognition that no single package can span the entire process portfolio of
an enterprise, and cost-efficiency is usually lost when organisations’ business practices
deviate from the ones packaged within those applications. Furthermore, current applications
and software development practices are considered insufficient in fulfilling complex
business requirements if they do not appropriately address the business processes as they
constantly evolve and change.
For these reasons, enterprises should migrate from monolithic application architecture
to service-oriented architectures and other emerging application integration and
development practices. This migration will be critical for creating an agile application
architecture that will support emerging business practices, such as business activity
monitoring and the real-time enterprise.
Implementing service-oriented applications assumes that Information Systems (IS)
organizations will change application development (AD) methods, tools and roles. IS
organizations will require coexistence strategies as they move from traditional, structured
analysis and design (A&D) methodologies (e.g Yourdon, SSADM) to object-oriented/UML
and business process automation (BPA) or workflow methods to specify service and
component design requirements [1].
 Enterprise Information Suite (EIS) is considered as a paradigm of the SOD approach
that enhances enterprises potentials in order to constantly adapt to changing business needs.
By using the term EIS, we mean the essential software infrastructure for integrating various
multivendor back-office subsystems (such as ERPs) and for providing the required
enterprise-specific functionality & information. To this end, EIS introduces a versatile set
of constructs specifically designed for the delivery of business applications that provide
inter- & intra-enterprise integration and collaboration functionality facilitating the cross-
function, cross-enterprise business processes execution. The EIS Architecture comprises of:
• A process mapping framework that translates business processes workflows to
executable specifications,
• A core system responsible for the co-ordination and execution of the business process
logic,
• A comprehensive set of business connectors to packaged or legacy applications.
All end-user applications and system-supported functionality are provided through web
interfaces, via existing, or configurable EIS-portal construction components and templates.
This paper briefly presents the EIS architecture and discusses its advantages in
comparison with legacy approaches. The paper is structured in the following way: Section 2
discusses the transition from legacy application to EIS based integration and the main goals
of the proposed approach. In Section 3 the overall architecture and the main components of
EIS are briefly described. Section 4 sketches the application of EIS in the Banking sector,
providing the essential IT infrastructure for automated business process modelling and
application integration in order to enhance specific banking activities such as loan-
monitoring operations. The final section gives the advantages of the proposed architecture
in terms of business benefits and the future work that has to be carrying out.
2. From legacy applications to EIS based application integration
The introduction of EIS multiplies the potential capabilities of certain enterprise solutions
that integrate various business applications and makes maximum interoperability possible
among them.
The transition from current, application driven interaction to a business oriented model
where EIS is the “heart” of integrated enterprise solution is the key issue for the successful
adoption of the new approach. The acceptance of such a framework is deeply based on the
fulfilment of a number of essential platform characteristics stem from the business needs as
they have been mentioned in the previous paragraphs. These main issues that our proposed
solution tries to resolve are:
• Process Collaboration. Business processes complexity & multiple interrelations among
enterprises’ personnel & trading partners are supported by efficient process
collaboration functionality based on inherent workflow monitoring mechanisms.
• Application integration. The success of EIS is based on the ability to adopt and integrate
various multi-vendor applications mainly for back-office systems (such as ERP).
• Rapid process modelling & workflow development. In today’s volatile business climate,
the need for automated business process modelling and re-engineering is essential in
order to have strategic advantage and provide customised products & services in a
timely manner. This issue is even critical for the enterprises of the New Economy and
for certain services/activities of the banking sector (such as loan monitoring). Robust
tools for developing & operating workflow management systems for business
operations will be the key components of the future Enterprise Information Systems.
• Common & customizable security mechanisms. Since EIS supports a variety of intra-
and inter-enterprise collaborative relationships a uniform security mechanism is
essential for a robust and well-defined security administration.
• Business solutions management & monitoring. One of the main advantages of EIS is the
ability to provide configurable management & monitoring capabilities for the business.
Towards the fulfilment of these issues, EIS’s primary goal is to become the essential
software infrastructure for integrating processes and organizations over extended
enterprises, automating the generic or the specific processes of various horizontal or
vertical industries.
EIS incorporates a process-modelling component offering the means to achieve the
alignment and the linking of the business process model with the supporting applications.
The added value of EIS towards supporting enterprise operations automation can be
summarized in the following:
• Modelling and design of workflow management tools based on the decomposition of
Business Processes at basic functional units that interact and communicate within a
multivendor environment in a uniform and interoperable way.
• End-user application-oriented software development. The EIS prospect is to serve
enterprise needs as the essential underlying infrastructure for the realization of tailor-
made end-user applications that utilizes the existing enterprise resources and
infrastructure (ERP, CRM, HRM, e-Procurement, Legacy databases etc.) in a uniform
way by seamless and transparent encapsulation of vendor specific implementations.
EIS adopts emerging business-to-business process-centric standards providing process
meta-models and process interface specifications. The EIS adapters, at the lower level of
architecture, allow message transformations between collaborative systems to be
incorporated and deployed. The message structure as well as transport and communication
are conducted via standard protocols and messaging standards (ebXML, xCBL, etc.) [9], so
that businesses will be enabled to reach to a large number of trading partners and service
providers, and exploit existing content for advanced business operations.
3. EIS Architecture
The proposed EIS system has two important innovations:
• Firstly, the introduction of an end-user application framework for the work flow
synthesis and realisation of vendor independent (business process) applications, based
on existing middleware functionality provided by a Web Services customisable library
and the appropriate modelling, design & execution environment [5], [6].
• Secondly, the introduction of a subsystem (Wizard Driven Construction of Adapters -
WDCA) which is the framework, aiming to construct the required for each application’s
case enterprise adapters using a parameterised environment based on application’s
specific integration & interoperability requirements. The produced adapters can be able
for a static or dynamic configuration. In the latter case, they can accept parameters in
real-time and can adjust their behaviour accordingly.

3.1 Overall Architecture

Current & future business needs for homogeneous & seamless facilitation of business
operations from the enterprise applications is fulfilled through the adoption of innovative
information technologies (i.e.: Web Services and Resource Adapters) that allows the
development of enterprise applications as building blocks, capable of communicating with
each other and access back office capability in a uniform and vendor independent way.
Figure 1 presents a generalized diagram of EIS infrastructure and how this platform can
act both as an enterprise provision framework and as the essential application integration
facility.
 Figure 1 – Overall EIS Architecture
The principal components of the overall EIS architecture are described in the following
paragraphs.

3.2 Business Process Modeller

The Business Process Modeller (BPM) is an autonomous environment allowing definition

and designing of complex business process workflows consisted of reusable software
components such as web services. The user has to begin with the use case design in UML
or other similar modelling technique and take it further to the comprehensive modelling of
the process defining the steps and interconnections rules that bind together software
components form the existing Web services pool. This pool stores service descriptions in a
widely accepted standard like Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) [12]. BPM’s
model should also be comprehensive enough to contain semantics for importing web
services definitions from WSDL documents and exporting business process flows to an
appropriate output standard like Business Process Execution Language for Web Services
(BPEL) [13]. The BPM-based modelling process follows four phases:
• Web Service Requirements Phase.
• Web Service Import Phase.
• Workflow Composition Phase.
• Workflow Export Phase.
Business Process Modeller design supports state-of-the-art standards and incorporate the
most suitable and modern modelling languages.

3.2.1 Workflow Execution Engine

Workflow execution engine, is taking as input for the model of the business transaction
(BPEL) and a request to initiate the execution process. The Workflow Execution Engine is
consisted of a parser for processing the XML-based workflow descriptions, a control unit
which executes the process by dynamically invoking the relevant web services. The
Execution Engine operates in the following steps:
• The BPEL/XML parser translates elements of the workflow’s description in BPEL
(which is based on XML) retrieving and passing to the control unit, semantic and
syntactic information about services and the transactions between them.
• The Execution Control Unit is responsible for the execution progress. According the
specific model and requested web services it addresses the dynamic invocation
procedures to establish communication with the involved web services. Control unit
also processes the web service responses. The Dynamic Invocation Procedures is an
innovation of this approach since, Web service development platforms today, support
only static service invocation in order to call a web service they create an interface class
at design-time.

3.3 Wizard Driven Construction of Adapters – WDCA

The adapters’ purpose is to provide a level of abstraction between the services provided by
the system and the organization’s back-end systems.
Based on the well-established J2CA [4], the WDCA is consisting of three models
(Logical Model, JCA Contracts, Implementation Models), which will form multiple
combinations to produce the final abstract model for each required adapter and code
resources (Implementation Resources). The latter are consisting of predefined pieces of
code that will be assembled according to the derived final abstract model to produce the
adapters. There is a mapping from the set of the Implementation Models onto the set of the
Implementation Resources.
• Logical Model will be defined in an abstract way, free of any constraints imposed by
the implementation details. It will be a generic model, which will be fitted to the
different types of adapters required for the Enterprise Integration to produce a set of
generic adapter templates.
• JCA Contracts will define the physical attributes derived from the J2EE Connector
Architecture (JCA) specification. A set of contract templates can be constructed with
the help of the JCA Contracts based on the Logical Model.
• Implementation Models will be the support for the J2CA adapters for applications such
as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel from the application vendors.
4. Appling EIS approach to banking operations
The banking sector is a competitive environment, where business process re-engineering is
constantly needed. Simultaneously, the market drives banks to innovate in product
development and process design. As an additional requirement, organizational integration
of different teams, departments and branches has to be taken into account. Business process
modelling and automation are effective tools towards the improvement of the performance
of business activities and enabling enterprise-wide monitoring and coordination.
Loan monitoring is a typical banking activity, which includes business processes
concerning loan approval, collection of delinquent loans and initiation of appropriate legal
claims. These processes are often performed in cooperation with external business partners,
such as legal firms and brokers, have collaborative properties and are considered to be of
dynamic nature. Their efficiency strongly depends on human operator experience and
subjective criteria.
Our proposed architecture is being applied as the essential software infrastructure for
the realisation of an automated collaborative environment that manages and monitors
bank’s processes and provides the essential application integration with back office systems
and legacy applications of the loan-monitoring department of a bank.
In this case, EIS is considered the cornerstone of external (bank-to-customer & bank-to-
partners), internal IT interactions and as the essential integrator of IT activities within the
enterprise. The adoption of the EIS approach is offering the essential tools and facilities in
all the phases of Business Process management starting from the information gathering and
the essential business process re-engineering activities to Business Process Model definition
and the workflow implementation to enterprise application integration.
The application usage requirements that EIS, have to cope up with the requirements of
automating loan monitoring operations, are summarized in the following [8]:
• Direct Access, control and connectivity. The platform should support the different
access rights of its participants. In addition, the platform should permit the coexistence
of multiple connection methods, reflecting the existing or emerging connectivity
patterns preferred by the host enterprise partners.
• Sensitive data sharing with selective partners. EIS should be able to reveal sensitive
business information to chosen customers and suppliers. For instance, it can flag
problems involved in a specific loan payment procedure, allowing faster and automated
resolution.
• Enriched loans capabilities. EIS should also allow the bank to sell products based on
features other than price, by providing additional information to potential borrowers.
For instance, products bundled with additional service agreements based on customer
needs, type of loan etc.
• Business agreement-based collaboration. EIS should provide real-time connectivity and
collaboration with business partners (e.g. public authorities, financial institutes),
reflecting and supporting existing agreements.
Based on the description of the EIS architecture given in the previous paragraphs the
requirements mentioned above are fulfilled through the following functional characteristics
and the related capabilities of the platform:
• Incorporate and automate complex processes simply and easily. Design models for
every type of process in a user-friendly visual environment can be incorporated along
with existing roles and hierarchies, and connecting them with existing LDAP directory
services. In this way new processes & supporting documents & forms can be easily
configured and integrated into the existing business processes.
• Effectively manage and execute the underlying processes. User-friendly, functional web
interface for end-users are used. Assignment of tasks in accordance with roles (parallel
assignment) and management of deadlines, delays, and emergencies, and automatically
inform relevant personnel is assured.
• Monitor processes and gauge their effectiveness. The generation of a range of static and
dynamic reports from which useful conclusions can be drawn is provided and
monitoring of processes and critical performance coefficients in real time is given.
• Easily configure new processes.
5. Business Benefits
The business benefits from the realization of EIS as the software infrastructure for
application integration and business process co-odinator stem from the introduction of
innovative software design concepts (such as service oriented architecture & development)
and technologies (such as Web-Service suite).
Service-oriented development will be popularized by Web services and enabled by
advances in other software technologies. This will allow service oriented approaches such
as EIS to play an increasingly strategic role in a growing number of enterprises, including,
but not limited to, those willing to invest in innovative business strategies such as a
multichannel approach [3].
Research analysts predict that by 2008, enterprises will need to operate in zero-time.
This means that information and IT support of business processes must happen within
weeks or months [3]. Because of this trend, the average duration of a project will be less
than four months, thus making platforms like EIS a necessity for the organization. In
addition by 2007 at least 60% of new application and integration projects will use web
services technology [10], this means that Web services markets are expected to increase
from $152 million in 2002 to $3.1 billion by 2007 and they will be evolving as a portion of
the total application integration, application server, and enterprise portal markets [7].
The successful application of EIS platform in the deployment of enterprise applications
can offer new business opportunities to software vendors. More specifically:
• The success factor for the software vendors is its ability to exploit state-of-art
technologies such as web services combined with innovative techniques for Business
Process modelling. The implementation of EIS platform offers the potentials to provide
timely and cost-effective solutions to enterprises, thereby creating new market
opportunities based upon significant technological advantages.
• Through the business process modelling based on EIS, tailor made solutions for vertical
business integration can be deployed in a rapid and efficient way through customization
and parameterization of the business process models. In this way, flexible adoption of
new & changing external market conditions and internal business operations can be
easily applied without disrupting everyday business activities.
6. Conclusions
Technologies around Web services have the potential to dramatically affect the future
design of software solutions across many IT markets. However, Web services technologies
will also undergo significant backlash and disillusionment as early stage promises give way
to technical, economic and political realities. Web Service based frameworks enabling
effective Business Process management and robust application integration will greatly
influence inter- and intra-enterprise activities. EIS can be considered as a viable solution,
exploiting mature Web Services technologies & standards in order to provide the essential
software infrastructure for building B2B & B2C applications.
Our future plans for the EIS include extensive functional evaluation of the platform and
the developed applications for sector specific cases (such as loan monitoring for the
banking sector). In addition, the realization of an automated Web-service creation
environment is underway, the integration of such tool with the Business Process Modeller
will provide a robust mechanism for developing customized, business oriented web services
in a rapid & reliable way. Finally, the integration of current & future web-service standards
for transaction handling, security and authentication procedures is foreseen. In this way,
EIS could be considered as a self-contained framework able to adopt future advances of the
Web Service industry.
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