This year at Devoxx Belgium, Maciej, Edoardo and Mario held a 3h deep dive on Kogito. Since Devoxx is so awesome to share the recordings of all their presentation online, wanted to give everyone the opportunity to go and watch this!
I also had the opportunity to help out at the Red Hat booth for 2 days, and it was a great opportunity to sync up with a lot of people and do some Kogito evangelization. And was there live for the big announcement of Quarkus doing its 1.0 release !
RPA Enablement: Focus on Long-Term Value and Continuous Process Improvement
Massimiliano Delsante - Cognitive Technology Ltd.
The myInvenio tool can be used to discover processes based on data already collected. It will derive the process (the tasks, actors, sequence, etc.) from the data and cross-check that with the cases that are already recorded (for example see which are deviating, where time is spent, etc.).
This information can then be used to derive which activities might be the best candidates for automation. By running a simulation, you can decide for example to add two robots for automating one of the steps (at least the simple cases) and keep one employee for more complex and exceptional cases.
Integration is Still Cool, and Core in your BPM Strategy
Ben Alexander - PMG.net
PMG provides drag and drop low-code processes, with pre-built connectors. The process included human tasks for approval, but also supported integration with email, phone or text, or slack, etc. It contacts external services (like Azure ML) for risk assessment, and included some RPA integration.
Making Process Personal
Paul Holmes-Higgin and Micha Kiener - Flowable
Chat is becoming more and more an important communication channel for customers. Flowable showed an example of how banks are using lots of different channels to communicate with customers, like a chatbot, and using BPMN2 and CMMN during conversations.
A digital assistant is constantly helping the client advisor during his conversation by creating (sub)cases, advising actions, etc. For example, it can help enter a client address change, validate the information, ask validation, send confirmation emails, involve a compliance officer if necessary, etc. Behind the scenes, the digital assistant is backed by a process (with forms etc.). Finally, integrating Machine Learning can be used to replace some of the manual steps.
Robotics, Customer Interactions, and BPM
Francois Bonnet - ITESOFT
A demo with an actual (3d printed, open-source) robot ! Francois brought a robot with video and voice recognition capabilities. The robot could be used for example in a shop for greeting clients. Voice recognition can be used to start a process (for example when the customer comes in). The robot can respond to several commands, follow, do face recognition, take pictures, etc. all by configuring various processes. The voice and face recognition isn't always working perfectly yet, but interesting to see anyway !
The Future of Voice in Business Process Automation
Brandon Brown - K2
Voice recognition can be used to create a chatbot. The chatbox can for example be used to request PTO, get your tasks (and complete or even delegate them). But chatbots aren't great for everything. Some data is just easier to provide in a structured form. But even forms can be enhanced with for example sentiment analysis (to automatically update the data based on the sentiment detected from the text provided in the form). You can then for example create standard processes for how to respond to certain sentiments.
State Machine Applied to Corporate Loans Process
Fernando Leibowich Beker - BeeckerCo
Processes can be unstructured and rely on rules for defining when tasks should be triggered or not. The demo is using IBM BPM state machine in combination with IBM ODM where the rules define what the next state will be based on the current state and the input.
An awesome surprise this year, the videos from yesterday are already available on youtube! So I've updated my posts from yesterday with the links, amazing job!
BPM 2018-2022: Outlook for the Next Five Years
Nathaniel Palmer
Nathaniel is starting with an outlook of where we are (maybe?) going in the next few years. The three R's that will define BPM in his point of view are Robots, Rules and Relationships. With everything running in the cloud. And using Blockchain ;)
Interaction has already significantly
changed (with everyone having a smartphone), but he predicts the
smartphone (as we know it) will go away in the next five years - with
consumer adoption of new interfaces accelerating even more.
Robots (including any kind of smart device or service) will represent customers in various interactions. And will do a lot of the work done by employees nowadays. Even autonomously. This all will have an impact to application architectures, almost introducing a 4th tier in typical 3-tier architectures.
The future-proof BPM platform (aka the Digital Transformation Platform) brings together various capabilities (like Workflow Mgmt, Decision Mgmt, Machine Learning, etc.) - possibly from different vendors - processing events from many different sources (services, IoT devices, robots, etc.).
And he ended with the advice, that the best way to invent the future, is to help create it !
A Next-Generation Backendless Workflow Orchestration API for ISVs
Brian Reale and Taylor Dondich, ProcessMaker
ProcessMaker is showcasing their cloud-based process service. It exposes a REST api for interacting with it, and has connectors to various external services. The service does not come with a BPMN2 designer, but they accept BPMN2 and offer a programmatic interface to create processes as well. They also introduced a "simplified" designer that ISVs can use to define processes (that underneath exports to BPMN2 as well), but hides a lot of the more complex constructs available.
CapBPM’s IQ – No-code BPM development – Turning Ideas into Value
Max Young, Capital Labs
To avoid being locked into one vendor, IQ is offering a generic web-based user interface for BPM, that can be used on top of various underlying BPM platforms. On the authoring side you can define process and data models and do different kinds of analysis. In the end, it generates open-source application code that work with a specific product (that your developers can use as a starting point).
Monitoring Transparency for High-Volume, Next-Generation Workflows
Jakob Freund and Ryan Johnston - Camunda
Camunda is showing Zeebe, their next generation process execution platform. The demo starts when an arbitrage opportunity is detected, and then does various risk calculations. Zeebe Simple Monitor is a web-based monitoring tool to look at deployed processes and running instances. With Optimize you can create and look at reports based on the various events that Zeebe is generating, including charts, heat maps, alerts, etc.
And as a treat, they showed a doom like easter egg inside their Cockpit, where you can walk through your process "dungeon" and shoot tokens with your shotgun :)
The recordings from the bpmNEXT 2016 conference (which I blogged about here) are available (for quite some time already it seems, I must have missed it somehow), but wanted to share the video of the presentation I did related to case management.
It's a topic we are asked about regularly, and this presentation + demo might give you a good idea of where we are going:
The dashboard-builder is used in the jBPM project to offer customizable reports regarding overall status of your processes (using predefined process reports integrated into the jBPM console), but can also be customized by users to define custom, domain-specific reports on whatever data you have available.
David has created a great video on how to use the dashbuilder for example to get insight in changes people are doing to git repositories, and published this video showing for example the activity on various jBPM-related source code repositories over the past few years:
Internally, the workbench is also using a git repository underneath to keep track of the various changes users are doing to their processes etc. in their projects. jBPM 6.2 will include a similar page that can be used to get an overview of who is changing which repositories / projects and drill down into the details, a short video can be found here.
New activity pages can also be used to get an overview of recent changes. Activity pages, that provides insight into projects.
The first Activity page captures events and publishes them as timelines, as a sort of social activities system - which was previous blogged in detail here. This allows events such as "new repository" or "file edited" to be captured, indexed and filtered to be displayed in custom user dashboards. It will come with a number of out of the box filters, but should be user extensible over time.
(click to enlarge)
Early versions of both features should be ready to test drive in the up coming 6.2.0.Beta2 release, end of next week.
The webinar we recently did on JBoss BPM Suite 6.0, including a 15-20min demo of the web tooling in action, is now available on demand. Click the "Register Now" button below to register and you'll be able to view the entire webinar on demand.
Automate workflows now with a leading open source BPM platform
Looking
to build powerful workflow automation solutions? Red Hat JBoss BPM
Suite 6.0, now generally available, brings Business Activity Monitoring
and Business Process Management capabilities from the jBPM community
project together in to a single, integrated product.
Join us in this webinar to learn:
How
to get started quickly with the fully integrated User Interface,
Process Simulation and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools.
The best use cases for running the process execution as a stand alone server vs. embedded mode.
How to seamlessly manage decision logic with business rules optimization
What's coming next...
Speakers:
Prakash Aradhya, Product Management Director, JBoss BPM and BRMS Platforms, Red Hat Prakash
Aradhya is responsible for driving the product strategy and roadmap for
JBoss Enterprise BRMS and BPM products. He has over 15 years of
experience in product development and product management in the
middleware software industry.
Dr Kris Verlaenen, Principal Software Engineer, Lead BPM Architect, Red Hat Kris
Verlaenen leads the jBPM Project effort and is also one of the core
developers of the Drools project, to which he started contributing in
2006. After finishing his PhD in Computer Science in 2008, he joined
JBoss full-time and became the Drools Flow lead. He has a keen interest
in the healthcare domain, one of the areas that have already shown to
have a great need for a unified process, rule and event processing
framework.
The Red Hat UK SA team has been working at a demonstration that shows how different Red Hat projects can be brought together to form one big solution. As part of this, they created a demo that shows a Car Insurance Policy Quote process:
It asks the user for input (driver information and car information and does various calculations in between to calculate the policy risk and price, using a decision table. It is using JBoss BRMS 5.3.1 (which includes support for jBPM5) on top of EAP6.
Derek created a small video showing this in action as well:
The sources can be found here. Eric Schabell also extracted the policy quote process and packaged it inside his demo framework here.
This fun, easy-to-understand video illustrates how the combined business
rules, business process and complex event processing capabilities of
JBoss Enterprise BRMS can help shipping companies become intelligent,
integrated enterprises.
It's a marketing video, don't expect anything technical ;) I think it's fun to watch though !
