Key Functionality & Technical Papers

Services-Oriented Architecture and Simulation On Demand

In the last 3-4 years business and IT managers have begun to implement a new approach to organizing IT resources, which is usually referred to as a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Like other recent IT architectures, SOA provides flexibility for an increasingly complex business environment, and requires that companies master new tools to assure that new applications are designed effectively. The key benefits of using SIMPROCESS as a simulation service in an SOA are:

• This concept extends the usefulness of analysis models beyond the up-front business process analysis phases. A greater return on investment is achieved when developing business process analysis models since long-term use of the models is achieved. It provides the capability for the business process models to transition from a passive role to an active role in business process management.
• Simulation provides valuable business performance insight above and beyond the current situational data presented in traditional BAM and BSC-type dashboard solutions. Most BAM-type solutions only look at past data and provide key business metrics based on what has already happened in the business. None of the BAM solutions on the market use process simulation to provide predictive performance metrics.
• SIMPROCESS simulations provide a context for the business performance metrics. Most BAM solutions that rely on data, transaction, and system integration techniques do not have a good way to correlate the performance metrics directly to a customer's business process model.
• This concept closes the loop for customer's business process improvement lifecycle by automatically simulating business performance and using the results of the simulation to feed back into continual business process analysis. In other words, it reduces the need to constantly "drive" the simulation for business process analysis.

Simulation-on-demand can significantly extend current ideas about process monitoring, decision support and BAM, facilitating a new generation of monitoring systems that not only report current data, but provide projections to assist managerial decision making.

SIMULATION ON DEMAND: Using SIMPROCESS in an SOA Environment (pdf download)