Hi Pepe, so yes you can embed jbpm in your application and decide how to manage your process programatically. The book mention guvnor and the console, but none of the examples show that. All the examples provided in the book are using the APIs in exactly the same way that you want.
"Production environment" means a lot of thing to different people. I suggest you to start small with one process in a controlled environment to see then how to scale your solution. Usually embedding jbpm in your application will give you a lot of freedom, but then you need to manage well all the power that the framework gives you.
Hope it helps
Cheers