Design And Implementation Of BPM System For Master Data Approvals In Retail Companies

Vendor master data and merchandise master data are very important, their updates involve many departments especially in retail companies, so these updates need to go through multi-stage approvals before they come into force. Enterprise A is a large retail enterprise, it had been maintaining master data only in SAP, SAP is powerful and highly configurable, is most good at managing manufacturing’s ERP, but even SAP retail version doesn’t supply the functions of multi-stage approvals for master data updates, the master data updates come into force after a simple ‘save’ operation, which lacks online multi-stage approvals; Actually SAP total solution is powerful, highly configurable and most good at managing ERP, there is a technique platform named SAP BPM in SAP product line which can enable workflow’s execution to circulate automatically and integrate with the implemented SAP modules, if enterprise A implement SAP BPM, it can realize multi-stage approvals for master data updates, but if so, the cost of implementing SAP BPM will be expensive, the reality is Enterprise A doesn’t have so much budget. So, the multi-stage approvals for master data updates in Enterprise A had been processed by troublesome Emails and hand signatures, these paper documents are not convenient to be kept and always being lost, which brought risks.Aimed at resolving the above issue in Enterprise A, this thesis proposed building a system that supports online multi-stage approvals and doing development & configuration on the engaged Interchange Server middleware(ICS middleware) to enable the communication between the new system and SAP, this system would be able to get master data from SAP for modification and online multi-stage approvals, and would also be able to transfer master data that went through approvals of all stages to SAP through ICS middleware for taking effect. Thus this solution would make master data updates rigorous and convenient with lower investment.We adopt Java as the technical basis when building BPM system, it’s an object-oriented programming language, has been widely used because it has excellent efficiency, compatibility, portability and security. But Java is constructed in Neumann architecture, it executes instructions sequentially, so pure Java couldn’t pause execution previously, this issue must be resolved when we use Java in building BPM system. We adopt JBoss jBPM,it’s a powerful workflow management system which can be easily extended and transplanted. jBPM uses graph-oriented programming, the core method of graph-oriented programming is programming for runtime graph execution with simple command, this means graph is a component of jBPM software, and graph execution integrate tightly with command interpreter software during runtime, so graph-oriented programming convert java to a graph-oriented programming language, it implement ‘execution pause’ and ‘execution persistence’ by extending Java’s Neumann architecture; jBPM has intuitive and powerful process language expresses terms of business process graph, such as ‘waiting state’ of process, task, timer and so on, all these constitute powerful and scalable control process mechanism in jBPM. The BPM system implemented in this project is based on jBPM. In this project we introduced ‘Graph execution model’ including nodes, transitions(including transitions entering a node and transitions leaving a node), token(the execution route in a system, have a pointer point to a node), signal(make the token leave a node), action(a paragraph of code executed in the process event) and so on, especially the visible action introduced in the ‘Graph execution model’ enable business analyst to model freely, and also enable the developer to add execution details for business process without modifying the original graph built by the business analyst.The case uses Struts2 frame work(it’s an open source software), implements this BPM system by doing customized development under SSH frame(it’s a Model-View-Controller frame) in jBPM; Go deeper, the code in model part of this BPM system is built by Enterprise Java Bean(EJB), view part built with JSP technical specification, the scheduler program of controller part adopts servlet, the html pages in front-end in which user operated are developed under Jquery frame. And use middleware techniques IBM WebSphere Message Queue(MQ) and IBM WebSphere Interchange Server(ICS) in design and implementation of the communication between this BPM system and SAP.We did unit test and integration test after completed the development, we arranged training and User Acceptance Test(UAT) for the users, after the UAT passed, we got the BPM system go-live. The system has run stably after go-live, uses have been doing all the operations about multi-stage approval for master data updates in the BPM system, so this series of process has become strict, controllable and convenient, the cost of the project is much lower than the estimated cost if we implement SAP BPM.