BizTalk Server extends role to inter-system supply chain business process improvement

Microsoft’s marketing manager for integration servers, Gavin King, acknowledges that BPM is a relatively recent term, and says that it’s about: “connecting systems, people, processes and partners together in a dynamic orchestrated system that updates and can be changed to meet your organisation’s requirements.” Importantly, it’s also about being able to do that by building on your existing IT and network infrastructure. And it’s about doing it all more quickly and effectively using, for example, the standards being expressed in BPEL (business process execution language). “With BPM you define your business processes and express human interaction – not just transactional processes that are already automated,” he says. “So that’s complex document workflows and so on – making them automated, collaborative and exception-based using technology like Internet Messenger.” BizTalk Server is Microsoft’ hub technology for this: the software giant is now touting it as a BPM Server, with King making the point that it manages all three main workload types of the BPM domain. “First it helps you to integrate CRM [customer relationship management] software, ERP etc. It provides the ability to adapt or talk to anything you want. We have 25 out of the box adapters and we a partner network that supports RosettaNet and plant systems as well. So BizTalk does the connectivity and transformation for whatever you have – a mainframe, maybe a Cobol system that’s been on plant for 20 years, whatever. “Second, it handles the B2B side – EAI but also supply chain system interactions to provide real-time views rather than inter-system batch updates. Again, it communicates using a number of protocols: AS2, EDI, Swift etc – and you get BAM [business activity monitoring] so you can drill down into elements of the supply chain and look at exceptions.” That’s recently been augmented as a result of Microsoft’s relationship with global web trading exchanges builder GXS. “The third piece is BPM, and BizTalk provides modelling tools and the ability to simulate new business processes, with time measurements etc before executing them in the IT infrastructure itself.” Users of the whole stack so far include large financial institutions wanting to link multiple parties and applications in real time, and retailers like Tesco and Virgin, wanting to handle seasonality, promotions and POS interactions, with real time interactions across people, corporations and multiple systems. King says that although this all sounds very fancy, in fact BizTalk runs on a standard server – nothing special – and relies on the SQL database server to trap and move messages. He also indicates that set-up is straightforward and that the approach solves many of the bigger picture integration problems manufacturers are now waking up to. Lockheed Martin is one: that organisation is driving efficiencies in its supply chain – human processes, manual input and so on – with BizTalk BPM Server helping to defined business processes more rigorously, and driving improvements, visibility and automation. “On their Merlin Helicopters, they’ve drive down supply chain lead times for ordering components from four days to 25 seconds,” says King.