Hello,
Introduction
Our company is using a kind of CRM (tomcat,struts,ojb) where about 50 users work with about 2500 customer accounts.
Many of the working steps are repetitive. A self programmed sort of calendar is used to remind the crm user of the work to do.
A few days ago the CEO called in for a meeting. The subject was "a new calendar for the crm system".
This job of the new calendar is to
-enable the measurement of time consumption of certain units of work
-support the crm user to do all necessary units of work
-share calendar events between crm-user
...
after a few minutes and some questions, it seemed to me that we are not in need of a new calendar, but a business process management system.
Research
I started doing some research on the topic. I know fairly few things about BPM and haven't used any framework or system so far.
After a while jBPM seemd to be what i was looking for. I read the documentation and installed the demo.
From what I've seen and understood jBPM will provide the framework and tools to define business processes in various ways.
Allow monitoring, measuring and reporting of the processes and all the tasks within a process. It also has a focus on human tasks,
which would find heavy use in our company's business processes.
Problem
At this moment I don't have a clear picture of how to bring the two systems together (CRM+jBPM).
The idea behind BPM is to "force" the working entities to stick to a workflow and preform the required tasks.
At the moment all the tasks are done within the CRM. But the start, progress and completion of the tasks needs to be
controlled by the BPM-System now.
Question
In case we had business processes in a knwoledge base and reported the various events in the CRM to the BPM-system:
-what if the BPM system isn't available for some reason and a completed task couldn't be reported?
-should the processes be linked to the crm users or rather to the accounts?
Does anybody of you have some exprience with this kind of "system-integration/cooperation" ?
Or can you point me out to some helpful reading about this?
thank you very much.
greetings
hlux