Hi,

I am a newbie, and am very interested in process development in jBPM. I have a very interesting usecase at hand and need to give solution in its implementation.

We have currently implemented our BPM flow using Savvion 6.5 product. We are searching for an open source solution to migrate existing business flow. I found jBPM suitable for the requirement.

There are certain queries that I need to understand:

1. Is it possible to migrate existing case flows from Savvion to jBPM ?

2. If yes, how could we migrate from Savvion to jBPM?

3. If in case there is no solution, what details are required to have a customized utility for the same?

Our application is purely JEE based deployed on Weblogic Server and we use jax-WS to integrate with Savvion. So, I assume we can do the same using jBPM web-services.

Let me introduce to what we have implemented in the Savvion product:

We create business flow mainly using subprocesses (call-activity with child sub-processes in different templates), swim-lanes, split/XOR  gateways, data variables, LDAP connectors etc. available in Savvion.

We have 4-5 case types and each case-type has its own workflow. Every workflow has four phases and each phase has phase-activities which in-turn has worksteps (templates).

1. Phases could be intial, in-progress, contract and production.

2. Phase-activities are department specific. For eg. Sales, Operation etc.

3. Worksteps are assigned to a group(team) or specific user.

   Certain worksteps have some business-rule validation before execution which requires to be fulfilled.

   The approach used is using of tokens. A workstep can have many validation tokens separated by comma. e.g VALIDATE_EMAIL,VALIDATE_USERNAME.

Once we deploy this business flow, using Savvion BPM Studio, it internally copies the BPM related files to server and creates a table for each template.

Now the process is as follows:

1. Application has a provision to start the process flow - Savvion creates a process instance for the template and add one entry in respective database table. For eg, we have a template name 'App_CustomerContact', table name same as template name. This process-instance is related to only one case.

2. The application makes user available with assigned worksteps in the form of checklist. The user then completes these worksteps (We call it as measure-points). Once the user has completed his assigned worksteps, the next workstep will be available to team/other user as per business flow.

So we require to migrate our existing process-instances into jBPM and also create new processes using jBPM templates.

We do have knowledge how Savvion creates data into its database.

I am attaching a sample workflow template developed in Savvion BPM.