The Route to Automate Businesses
Mgr. Ivo Bek, Product Manager
Mgr. Marian Macik, Quality Engineer
April 2019
2
AGENDA
❏ BPM products and where to find them
❏ Business automation? What, why and for whom?
❏ Common needs for business automation solution
❏ Demo - Send an SMS map from my process
❏ Tools for integrated business automation
❏ Lab #1 - Git, custom services
❏ Lab #2 - DMN, business rules
3
BPM PRODUCTS
from Gartner analyst report 2019
Pega: No code demo
4
BUSINESS AUTOMATION
What do we need to automate?
● Approval decisions
● Eligible number of
vacation days
● Loan calculation
● Payment process
● Customer onboarding
● Rent car process
● Service requests
Decisions Tasks Processes Schedules
● Update a spreadsheet
● Scan and send a form
● Manufacturing /
assembly line
● Employee shift
scheduling (hospital,
school)
● Deliveries (VRP)
5
RETURN ON INVESTMENTS (ROI)
Frequency
Size and complexity
Diversity (actors, systems, rules)
Speed (SLAs)
Time (spent on a single manual task) x
Frequency (of performing a task per month) x
Cost (per hour) x 12 (months) = Yearly Savings
Our focus
so far
Why we need to automate some part of business?
6
● Shorten response time
● Streamline customer onboarding
● Improve cost/value rate
● Strengthen branding
● Routing and escalating events (CRM)
● Regular communication about the
news and future plans
● Deal with waste tasks ( repetitive,
duplicate )
● Risk mitigation and elimination
● Enforce state and business policies
THE ULTIMATE
GOAL
7
BUSINESS AUTOMATION
Who are the target users?
● Fill in data
● Make a decision
● Start a process
● Complete tasks
● Delegate a task
● See process logs
and errors
● Retrigger process
nodes
● Bulk process
instance migration
● Model a new process
● Update a rule in a
decision
● Reassign a task
● Monitor overdue
processes
Process Manager Process AdministratorKnowledge WorkerPractitioner
8
BUSINESS AUTOMATION
Common needs
❏ Fit into customer tech stack and project lifecycle
❏ CI/CD pipeline across multiple environments
DEV >> INT >> TEST >> PROD
❏ Roles and groups management
❏ Project and asset versioning
❏ Cross-team collaboration between analysts,
managers, and developers - use of many tools
and interchangeable formats
❏ No down time, scaling, automatic backups - run in
cloud HW - AWS, Azure
❏ Task and process events / data integration with
business data
DEMO
Send an SMS Map from My Process
10
IFTTT
❏ If This Then That, https://ifttt.com
❏ If Trigger Then Action(s)
❏ Simple tool for automation and integration
❏ Applets
❏ platform.ifttt.com
❏ Allows more than one action
❏ Simple guide how to configure an Applet
❏ Point no. 3 in
https://github.com/business-applications/sample-ifttt/blob/master/README.md
Tools for Integrated Automation
12
JENKINS
CI/CD pipeline across multiple environments
13
ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka
Event Sourcing and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) Pattern
❏ Audit trail - Full history of the state of the system
❏ Integration with other subsystems - Notify
interested subsystems of changes to the
application's state
❏ CQRS - Commands vs Queries
❏ ProcessStarted
❏ TaskCompleted
❏ TimerTimeout
❏ ProcessSignalSent
14
PROMETHEUS
Real-time metrics monitoring and alerts
❏ avg_over_time(dmn_evaluate_decision_nanosecond_bucket[5m])
DMN Evaluation time histogram
DMN Number of evaluations failed
15
UIPATH
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
RPA is any capability (software and services) that
allows you to transact in any IT application or
website, typically in the same way a human
would, to automate complex, rule-based work.
Broad Classification:
❏ Probots: process data, following simple
repeatable rules
❏ Knowbots: gather and store data
❏ Chatbots: act as virtual agents and
respond to customer queries in real time
16
APACHE SPARK MLLIB
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
"IBM’s attempt to promote its supercomputer programme to
cancer doctors (Watson for Oncology) was a PR disaster” says
Vyacheslav Polonski, Ph.D., UX researcher for Google and
founder of Avantgarde Analytics. “The problem with Watson for
Oncology was that doctors simply didn’t trust it.”
Users need to be able to understand and
validate models as well as explain why
decisions were made.
Random forests combine many
decision trees in order to reduce
the risk of overfitting (model
learning too many details and
noise).
Find loyal and fraud
bank customers
Identify the disease by
analyzing the patient's
medical records
Recommend the next
steps (customers usually
buy these 2 products
together)
DECISION TREES
❏ Each node is a simple question with
answers true/false
❏ 2 types of problems:
❏ Regression
❏ Classification
RANDOM FOREST ALGORITHM
❏ Higher the number of trees in the
forest, higher the accuracy of results
❏ Each tree covers only a subset of
features
HUMAN TASKS AUTOMATION
❏ AI (e.g. random forests) can be used
to automate human tasks, originally
designed for humans
❏ Pros:
❏ Speeds up work
❏ Cons:
❏ Can influence human decisions
Car rental approval
Prediction: Approve
Confidence: 96%
Approve Reject
ENTANDO APP BUILDER
UX platform for modern applications
plus.google.com/+RedHat
linkedin.com/company/red-hat
youtube.com/user/RedHatVideos
facebook.com/redhatinc
twitter.com/RedHatNews
THANK YOU
LABS
Work items and handlers
Team collaboration using Git
WORK ITEMS INSTALLATION
❏ First, you have to enable work item for whole Business
Central.
❏ Click on the wheel in the upper right corner.
❏ Select Service Tasks Administration.
❏ Enable the service task you want.
❏ Some work items are enabled and available by default:
❏ BusinessRuleTask
❏ DecisionTask
❏ Email
❏ JMSSendTask
❏ Rest
❏ ServiceTask
❏ WebService
WORK ITEMS INSTALLATION
❏ Now you can install it to your project.
❏ In project Settings/Service
Tasks, click on Install button.
❏ Fill in needed parameters, they
vary with each work item.
❏ Don’t forget to save it.
WORK ITEMS INSTALLATION
❏ You should see your work item handler
declared in Settings/Deployments/Work Item
Handlers.
❏ In case you have enabled and installed a work
item which is not a default one, you will have to
add it as a dependency for your project.
❏ In Settings/Dependencies, click on
Add from Repository.
❏ Select the work item dependency, e.g.
org.jbpm.contrib:ifttt-workitem:7.19.0.Final
for IFTTT work item.
❏ Dependencies should be added to your
project.
❏ Don’t forget to save it.
EMAIL WORK ITEM CONFIGURATION
❏ Configuration for GMail:
❏ new org.jbpm.process.workitem.email.EmailWorkItemHandler("smtp.gmail.com", "587",
"testMail@gmail.com", "testPassword", "true")
❏ Don’t forget the last parameter “true”. This will instruct Business Central to use secure TLS
connection, which is needed for GMail.
❏ In GMail account, don’t forget to enable access for less secure apps.
❏ Configuration for MailSlurper:
❏ Change wwwPort to 8180 (or any other available port on your system) so it doesn’t clash with
Business Central 8080 port
❏ Create credentials
❏ new org.jbpm.process.workitem.email.EmailWorkItemHandler("localhost", "2500", "user",
"password")
27
TEAM COLLABORATION VIA GIT
❏ Requires only basic Git skills
❏ Pull your business assets from Business Central
1. git remote add business-central
ssh://wbadmin@localhost:8001/MySpace/
<projectName> *
2. git pull business-central master
3. password wbadmin
❏ Push your business assets for example to GitHub
1. git push github master
❏ Import your business assets to another
Business Central either by pushing to it
or by cloning whole repository from UI
* URL can be found in Settings/General Settings of your project, just prepend it with wbadmin@