As Published In March/April 2006

Process Portals: A New Way to See Business
By Alan Joch

Portals and workflow processing engines combine to smooth corporate data-integration woes.

Knowing their business's key metrics was vital for Texas Industries (TXI), the growing Dallas, Texas, building materials supplier. With 100 locations and 2,800 employees across Texas, California, and Louisiana, TXI needed to keep a tight rein on business processes for sales, scheduling, and deliveries.

Putting Oracle Portal to Work: Integration Takes Flight Even though a portal doesn't have a workflow engine, it can still be an essential tool for data integration and better customer service. LibGo Travel, in Ramsey, New Jersey, uses Oracle Portal as the data integration "glue" to aggregate data from back-office applications that support two business units: Liberty Travel, a collection of consumer travel agencies, and GoGo Worldwide Vacations, which creates vacation packages sold by agencies. "Our concept is that of the 'agent desktop,' whether for Liberty Travel's retail agents or wholesale agents at GoGo Worldwide Vacations," says Armughan Rafat, LibGo's director of enterprise architecture. "The portal logs them into all the applications they need, whether it's for selling packages, directing their team, or managing HR. Everything is exposed out of Portal as portlets." LibGo does this using Oracle Portal tied to back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP), HR, and various custom Java applications on top of Oracle Database. "We are exposing all of these functionalities from the portal," Rafat says. LibGo launched the portal in 2004 as part of a data integration push. Calling the IT operations "extremely platform-agnostic," the IT department manages everything from legacy green-screen programs to Microsoft- and Java-based applications. The challenge: "managing different applications, different needs, different responsibilities, and deciding who to expose this functionality to, who not to expose it to, and managing separate profile databases for each application so people can log on," Rafat says. LibGo's search for a solution led it to portals. Rafat reports, "Single sign-on integration is one of the benefits of this system. I had my doubts about performance when we put it in front of 3,500 users, but we haven't seen any problems." For the future, LibGo is investigating a portal-based dashboard for sharing information with users. This will give the company a capability to know real-time information and treat it as a single source of truth, so the product can be further improved for customers.

But years of ad hoc IT purchases by local managers had turned the dream of enterprisewide data integration into a best-of-breed nightmare for the corporate IT department. "Just identifying our top companywide customers was hard to do," recalls Terry Marshall, TXI's IS director of application development.

Beginning four years ago, TXI decided that it was time for a change. Its first big push focused on the sales department, an area that company leaders decided had the biggest potential benefit from data integration. TXI built a data warehouse for centralized customer information and then "glued" the disparate systems together using a new spin on portal technology known as a process portal. "It linked together our processes into one consistent flow across our many business units in many regions," Marshall says. Now with real-time views into sales, accounts receivable, shipments, schedules, and product certifications all available through a single online interface, TXI's sales staff and senior executives no longer plod from one system to another to get a handle on business. That power translates into bottom-line results. Since the process portal went into place, TXI cut four days from its average days sales outstanding (DSO), a key metric for gauging how quickly the company collects receivables. "A good deal of this DSO reduction we attribute to having rapid access to accurate information via the portal," says Marshall.

And the top customers are no longer missing in action. "It's been an eye-opener seeing who they are and what they purchase," says Marshall. "It's helped upper management make better decisions about where to place our capital and where to invest in the future."

Not Your Parents' Portal

Process portals, the key to data integration that some large companies are discovering, aren't entirely based on new technology. Instead, process portals are the marriage of two established product categories: traditional Web portals and process workflow engines. The two areas are now available in a tightly integrated technology stack, so companies don't have to do a huge integration project before they actually begin to integrate their data. At the same time, process portals benefit from new open standards that add to their flexibility and reach.

Fusion Middleware: Based on Standards By Jeff Erickson Building a process portal is easier when your components are part of an integrated stack of standards-based middleware. You've got process middleware; you've got portal middleware—put them together, and let the benefits begin. Here are a few key building blocks of this integrated technology. Oracle BPEL Process Manager assembles a set of discrete services into an end-to-end process flow to reduce the cost and complexity of process integration. Oracle BPEL Process Manager offers a comprehensive infrastructure for creating, deploying, and managing BPEL business processes. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) integrates with existing systems to track processes and capture business events. Oracle BAM is designed to present real-time information and alerts in a Web-based portal environment. Oracle Business Intelligence 10g is a preintegrated business intelligence (BI) framework for building, deploying, and managing enterprise BI solutions. It includes query, reporting, analysis, data integration and management, desktop integration, and BI application development. End users get self-service access to powerful analytics and customization capabilities. Oracle Portal is the self-service, browser-based interface for your process portal. It provides security through an identity management infrastructure that centralizes the administration of users, groups, roles, and authorization privileges. Oracle Portal takes advantage of grid computing to allow services to be deployed on large numbers of low-cost, modular servers and storage for better performance, scalability, and availability.

Process portals do more than aggregate information, such as electronic brochures or sales statistics, on a central Web page. Behind the scenes, their workflow engines automatically set off business processes to accomplish a specific task.

"The process portal takes user interface technology from portals and combines it with process knowledge to build some really cool new solutions," says Eirik Lygre, CEO of e-vita, an Oslo, Norway, systems integrator and creator of iKnowBase, a content- and process-services module for process portals built with Oracle Fusion Middleware. For example, a process portal may let an employee get an electronic form requesting a cash advance for a business trip, and once he or she fills out the document, the portal sends it through the approval chain until it arrives with all the sign-offs at the proper finance department desktop.

"Portals are probably the best-in-class example of a composite application interface," says Mike Gotta, a principal analyst with Burton Group. "It looks like a single application presented as a page metaphor, but portlets on the screen might represent multiple fragments of applications." Metadata becomes the behind-the-scenes aggregation mechanism that brings fragments of applications, content, and collaboration and communication services together into a user interface. "Suddenly I don't care about applications in a traditional sense. All I know is that I have metadata, and that orchestration mechanism provides a strong context for the assembly of the right information, process elements, and community elements," Gotta says.

Process portals may also become essential tools for what some observers call "real-time" enterprises. "Compared to a 'human interrupt'-driven world where users initiate most business processes, physical events in operational environments may automatically kick off multiple simultaneous business processes," says Allan Saunders, Oracle product director for technology marketing, pointing to radio-frequency identification (RFID) and other sensor-based computing technologies. "A package passing through a dock door will generate an event saying something like, 'I'm leaving the dock door X now,' which could initiate multiple processes such as generating an advance shipping notification and initiating the billing sequence." Automating and optimizing business processes with tools like process portals will help companies adapt quickly to changing business conditions, he adds.

Snapshots Agder Energi www.ae.no Industry: Energy and broadband communications Location: Kristiansand, Norway Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Portal, Oracle Workflow, Oracle Discoverer LibGo Travel www.libertytravel.com, www.gogowwv.com Industry: Corporate and consumer travel Location: Ramsey, New Jersey Oracle products: Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle Portal, Oracle Application Integrator, Oracle E-Business Suite Texas Industries Inc. (TXI) www.txi.com Industry: Building materials Location: Dallas, Texas Oracle products: Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Portal, Oracle Workflow, Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Reports

The beauty of process portals: Their benefits are available without complex technologies or overhauls to existing IT infrastructures. "Process portals are not about fundamentally changing anything that's already there," notes Michael Andrew, principal product manager for Oracle Portal. Thus, they're attractive to many large companies, particularly those coping with mergers and acquisitions and the resulting mix of IT systems. "If they correctly implement the process portal, they can hide all of those different systems at the back end and present just the business processes that are important to end users," he says. "It's just a matter of tying together all the pieces." Companies can deploy process portals sometimes in as little as two or three months.

Process portals consist of a few key building blocks, including a database, an application server, and a workflow engine. Also necessary is a modeling environment where companies can map out and build their workflows. Once the process portal is running, companies need to monitor and optimize processes with a performance reporting tool to uncover bottlenecks. Last, process portal builders need an integrated development environment for building portlets that address changing business needs.

Typically, each of these pieces comes from a different vendor, requiring a substantial upfront integration effort. Oracle offers an alternative to this mix-and-match approach with Oracle Fusion Middleware, which packages each component within an integrated technology stack. "Rather than spending money on a first-level integration to get your process portal together, you can be up and running from Day One and focus on the business process integration challenge," Andrew says.

Now companies such as e-vita are selling commercial products that work in conjunction with Oracle Fusion Middleware to help end users launch process portals. The Norwegian company's iKnowBase technology creates templates for specific business tasks. Two categories are a case management process used by the city of Oslo and a new customer initiation process originally built for Agder Energi, one of Norway's largest electricity suppliers, based in Kristiansand. Agder Energi's process portal underpins a new strategy for rolling out digital communications services to power customers.

Agder Energi's expanding fiber network is bringing its residential customers a host of communications services, including internet access, broadband telephony, and TV. The company's process portal manages the workflow of delivering broadband services to households, a challenging task because of the many variables involved: Services may come through the company's fiber network or through asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) in conjunction with the country's traditional telephone services provider. Agder Energi then must assign passwords and e-mail addresses, and perhaps install cabling in the house and add set-top boxes and antivirus software. "It takes maybe four to six weeks to deliver all of this to the customer," says Ragnhild Aas Hystad, director of broadband delivery at Agder Energi. "It's very difficult when you have a large volume to manage."

4 Keys to Process Portal Success 1. Start small. Look for a specific business problem to solve, such as shortening time to market for a new product, and build a process portal that can help achieve that goal, advises Allan Saunders, Oracle product director for technology marketing. "First deploy [the portal] on a departmental level as opposed to the 'big bang' approach," he says. "This is a very good environment for kicking the tires and achieving a tangible benefit. Once it's working effectively, you can open the portal to the rest of the organization." 2. Start with a mission-critical application. TXI chose to build a process portal for its sales operations because the department and senior executives were likely to latch on to the expected improvements in information availability. "If you start with an application that people may or may not decide to use, you'll have a hard time getting adoption," says Terry Marshall, TXI's IS director of application development. 3. Do your homework. Before adding any new technology, companies should plan to model their existing process and look for ways to streamline operations, says Ragnhild Aas Hystad, director of broadband delivery at Agder Energi. "Spend the time to model a good process before you start implementing it," she adds. The modeling tool within products such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager lets companies visually map business processes to uncover optimization opportunities. 4. Make a commitment to performance improvements. Once the process portal is running, use tools such as Oracle Business Activity Monitoring to identify continuing performance issues. After it launched its process portal, Agder Energi tinkered under the hood to solve some slow response times. "We're improving [the portal] all the time," Hystad says.

Spreadsheets used to track the process, but they soon ran out of headroom, as did a Lotus Notes solution. "We needed workflow support," says Hystad. "When we found no system on the market that could provide that, we decided to build the system." Agder Energi hired e-vita to perform the work, which used an Oracle Fusion Middleware foundation, in August 2004. The portal launched in November of that year. Today the portal has grown to include a publishing tool that presents Agder Energi's broadband product information. "The tool integrates with the Oracle-based portal in a seamless way," Hystad says.

One of the benefits: With the process portal, the staff needs much less time to establish new customers. "We have much better control of customer service," she says. "When we didn't have this control, the progress of some new accounts sometimes stalled and we didn't find out until we got an angry call from the customer. But now, we have full tracking of where the customer is in the process."

Self-Service Benefits

TXI focused initially on a sales portal, but it soon expanded the idea to other areas of the company. Ultimately TXI wanted integrated IT operations throughout the company, but that endeavor would take time. "Consolidating our [enterprisewide] system would be a several-year project," Marshall says. So TXI found immediate gratification by consolidating key systems with process portal technology. "We could quickly develop and deploy the portal so users could see almost instant benefits," he says.

Next Steps VISIT the Oracle Portal home page READ how to improve collaboration and business productivity with enterprise portals DOWNLOAD Oracle Portal, either standalone or as part of the Oracle Application Server 10g Standard or Enterprise Edition

Once the sales portal came online, TXI launched a portal for customers, who now can view buying histories, place orders, pay invoices, and see product information online. Searching for a competitive edge was the catalyst for this project. In the past, customers had to call separate TXI people for prices, copies of invoices, and accounting questions. "It just made it very difficult for our customers to do business with us," Marshall says, mentioning that a customer said that he had to make five phone calls to get all the information he needed.

The portal solved those problems. "The customer portal put online all the information that customers used to get from TXI through calling, faxing, or the mail," Marshall says. "We've had very good feedback from customers about being able to access that information through the portal."

Subsequently TXI launched an employee portal with self-service applications for online updating of personnel files within the HR system, including hires, terminations, promotions, and raises, tied into a behind-the-scenes workflow process for routing of approvals. "We developed this system to aid other workflows. If you don't have the right people reporting to the right people, the routing won't work," Marshall says. "The great thing is that it reduces the data entry at the back end and empowers the managers and employees on the front end to make transactions."

In the end, it's all about empowerment. The upshot: TXI is back in control of the metrics it needs to run its business effectively—for customers and employees alike.