Opera21 BPM & SOA
Opera21
An Italian IT company, started in 2004.
One of the most brilliant strategic positioning and growth rates (among the
top 30 companies)
A winning business model: during years of stagnation in the market
Revenues & HC
2010
Revenues
61 MI
Employees
745
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Research Units
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Offices in Milan and Rovereto/Trento (mainly on
processes) and Naples (mainly mobility)
Strong exchange of people between delivery and research
Integration of products:
• Alfresco
• Pentaho
Development of projects:
• Spring (FWK, MVC, DAO, AOP)
• Apache (ServiceMix, Axis, CXF, Tuscany)
• JPA / Hibernate (MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle)
• JasperReport
Academic Collaborations
• University of Trento (Prof. Casati)
• University of Milan (Prof. Damiani)
• University of Naples (Prof. Maresca)
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Market seen Opera21
Begins to establish in Italy a certain attention to the centrality of processes
Underway in many public administrations activities of BPR or, at least, a formalization of
processes
ISO9000 certification is often a forerunner
Demands of internationalization and business transformation in many medium-sized
enterprises
Compliance requirements for banks and insurance (Basel II)
Alignment of the Italian headquarters of multinational group policy (introduction of BPM
strongly recommended by headquarters)
Need to focus on core business
• The perception of the need: sometimes the perception
Cost optimization and ROI
does not match the most appropriate solution
• The "document" remains a legacy of the management
style of many Italian companies and is an essential
component of the process
• The market-leading BPM solutions are marginally present
in Italy and with some difficulty
• Some Italian born provider of BPM-like solutions
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Opera21 and BPM / SOA
A System Integrator must be able to have different solutions.
Customers:
are diversified, medium and large organizations tend to
have more and more attention to processes,
require flexibility and timeliness in the delivery of IT
applications
The supply of IT includes:
Specific products, vertical process: ERP, CRM, SCM, ...
General Products
Developed ad hoc, on customer specifications
Process consulting
The approach BPM / SOA enables IT to effectively respond to
customer needs
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Criticality (1/2)
Products, many ... Too many!
Difficult for the customer to give precise request, is
too tied to the 'as-is’
Difficulty in understanding what is the best
technological solution (medium / long term)
Difficult to move from document-intensive
processes to people intensive .... Changes the
products. Similar methodologies.
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Criticality (2/2)
Customers qualms :
Fear of immobilizing the company
Defend self-sufficiency, necessity or fear of losing power?
Fears of getting into a spiral of rising costs
Distrust, often the initial impact is pejorative
"Processes do not exist in my domain" .... (?)
Terminology tricky
Process: process instance or process definition?
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Observations of vertical and custom solutions
Generalized solutions
They are optimized for a specific class of processes (ERP, CRM, SCM, HR)
The verticals are usually the added value of IT
Opera21 is a partner (SAP for ERP, CRM, SCM), Oracle (ERP, CRM Siebel, Peoplesoft HR)
Opera21 has specialization in manufacturing, customized production, distribution, and
chemical mills
Custom solutions
The process logic is "embedded" and optimized application
Optimized, if managed, reuse of large parts of the project
Competence driven domain, relational closeness to the customer
Competition from specialists
Opera21 has expertise in Destination Management (tourism processes), Salesforce
automation
Opera21 has a WMS (Warehouse Management System) solution
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Opera21 Research Projects on Processes
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
ROWS
Objectives
Bridging the gap between business analysts and IT
specialists
i.e. Provide a unique environment where domain
expert and computer scientist co-integrate the
same information.
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
What’s ROWS
A framework based on open source software
that allows you to manage and automate
organizational processes.
Difficult to make a product "off the shelf"
Initially used within the company
Requires resources trained on processes and
technologies
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Considerations for ROWS (1/2)
Difficulty to find experts
technologies are very large and complex
rely on Universities
need of strong internal training
MDA / MDE
heavily used
generated code is not editable
as much as possible similar to «what you would
developed»
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Considerations for ROWS (2/2)
Organization (RBAC)
not always clear
Authorization to functions or mainframe transactions
difficult to impose
impact on legacy
Repository of existing processes
Lots and little used
Often too high-level
Useful input to the analysis
Investment opportunities in reuse
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Opera21 Projects
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Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Project IANUS
A platform to facilitate the reorganization
and continuous improvement of business
process
Funding from the Autonomous Province of Trento
in collaboration with the University of Trento
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Control and monitoring of processes
Repository of processes
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Abstract processes (business process)
Standard (BPMN modeler)
Alfresco (text documents)
Multitenancy
Events and Log
• Events for legacy systems (or log files)
• Minimal impact on existing systems
KPI – Key Peformance Indicators
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Dynamic Definition
Different definition languages
Alerting for specific thresholds
Business Intelligence (Pentaho)
• OLAP (aggregate data)
• Drilldown
• Process DWH / Application DWH
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Logical repository and monitoring
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Discovery Process
Our target
• Reduce response time
• Optimize the support of business experts
• Provide semi-automatic modeling tool
• Having actual process and not the «textbook» process
• Integrated with the repository and monitoring
• Verify compliance with regulations, operating manuals
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Eventifiers
Targets
• Differences between theoretical process and real process
• Replacing existing software (Frigoscandia, 3PL operator)
• former supplier will never help
• users do not really know the full process
• only accessible information = operational database
• Comparing software usage (AREU 118 == 911 Lombardy)
• 10 branches to manage emergency calls
• same software , different managers… different
process?
• which process is more efficient?
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Logic of discovery
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
IanusPlus «The Vision»
Ratio
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Cloud is a reality
PAAS, Process As A Service is becoming a reality
Quality of Service (and no penalties) will become critical
Balancing of QoS between tenants will be fundamental
Accounting of services will be the trade off (small services
NOT accounted will make the difference between loosing
or earning money)
• Two of our products (WMS and Tourism offering) have
already custom solution, we need a Cloud oriented
generic solution.
• Most of the information for QoS and Accounting are
already in Ianus (events!)
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
IanusPlus extensions
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012
Contacts
For any question, inquiry, collaboration you can
contact us
Florian Daniel (daniel@disi.unitn.it)
Marco Aimar (maimar@opera21.it)
Opera21 Group SpA © 2012