SAP Process Orchestration

The Comprehensive Guide

John Mutumba Bilay, Roberto Viana Blanco

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493215607
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Part I

Getting Started

1 Introduction to SAP Process Orchestration

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
—W. Edwards Deming

As part of the SAP NetWeaver family, SAP provides a combo product called SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO), which helps businesses and their IT organizations achieve most of their integration needs. SAP PO is composed of three different components, formed into a comprehensive installation package: SAP Process Integration (SAP PI), SAP Business Rules Management (SAP BRM), and SAP Business Process Management (SAP BPM).

Note

From this point on, we’ll refer to SAP Process Orchestration or SAP PO whenever we’re talking about the packaging of Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX or SAP PI), SAP BRM, and SAP BPM.

This chapter will first explore how SAP PO came to be, what it is, and what it does. We’ll then discuss the different components that make up the SAP PO platform, explore why these components are needed, and how they make SAP PO an essential piece in an organization’s technology portfolio.

1.1 Historical Overview and Evolution

The three main components (SAP PI, SAP BPM, and SAP BRM) that make up the SAP PO software originate from SAP PI and SAP Composition Environment. In this part of the book, we’ll explore the product’s history and the way it evolved over the past years. Instead of focusing on every aspect of the evolution of the products, we’ll focus on the highlights. We’ll break the evolution history into three sections: SAP PI, SAP Composition Environment, and SAP PO. We’ll then highlight some of the new functionality introduced with SAP PO release 7.5.

1.1.1 SAP Process Integration

In 2002, SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) was launched as part of the SAP NetWeaver suite. SAP XI version 1.0 evolved into SAP XI 2.0 and SAP XI 3.0 in 2004. SAP XI was built on top of a dual-stack architecture, which includes SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP (SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP) and SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java (SAP NetWeaver AS Java).

After a few improvements and new features, the product was renamed from SAP Exchange Infrastructure to SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP PI) in 2005. The initial SAP PI version 7.0 evolved to SAP PI 7.01, SAP PI 7.1, and SAP PI 7.11. The SAP PI 7.11 version included a more prominent Java stack. This was called the Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE) with which you could choose to build an entire interface in the Java stack. Not all types of connections and functionalities were supported at this point. For some scenarios, you still needed to use the ABAP stack.

Figure 1.1 shows a visual representation of the history time line.

Figure 1.1 SAP Process Integration Evolution and History

In 2010, SAP PI 7.3 was released with a more productively equipped Java stack: Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX). This is a robust Java-only enterprise service bus (ESB) that can pretty much cover all the functionalities of the old dual stack, except that the processes previously implemented using cross-component Business Process Management (ccBPM) in a dual stack aren’t supported. The functionality to support the automation of a process is now provided in the SAP Composition Environment product. SAP PI 7.3 was later enhanced with SAP PI 7.31 in 2012. We’ll discuss SAP Composition Environment in the next section and provide a quick review of SAP PO in Section 1.1.3.

1.1.2 SAP Composition Environment

SAP Composition Environment is a platform that enables the building and running of applications based on service-oriented architecture (SOA). SAP Composition Environment comes equipped with tools that facilitate the development and composition of services and user interfaces (UIs) via a model-driven approach. With SAP Composition Environment, you can orchestrate new and existing services with the use of tools such as SAP BPM, SAP BRM, and SAP Composite Application Framework (CAF), among others. All of these tools facilitate the development of robust composite applications that leverage existing services.

SAP Composition Environment is part of the SAP NetWeaver suite and was first realized in 2007 with version 7.1 ...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Foreword
•   Acknowledgments
•   Introduction
• Part I   Getting Started
• 1   Introduction to SAP Process Orchestration
• 2   Administration and Development Tools
• Part II   Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX)
• 3   Configuring the System Landscape Directory
• 4   Working with the Enterprise Services Repository and Registry
• 5   Working with the Integration Directory
• 6   Building an Integration Flow
• 7   Administration and Monitoring in AEX
• 8   Migrating Interfaces from SAP PI Dual Stack to SAP PO
• Part III   Business Process Management and Composition
• 9   Introduction to SAP BPM and BPMN 2.0
• 10   Creating Your First SAP BPM Process
• 11   Applying Advanced SAP BPM Concepts and Extensions
• 12   Combining SAP BPM and UI Technologies
• 13   SAP Business Rules Management
• 14   Implementing Java Proxies
• 15   Administration and Monitoring Message Processing in SAP BPM
• 16   Migrating ccBPM from SAP PI to SAP PO
• Part IV   Advanced Concepts
• 17   SAP Cloud Platform Integration for SAP PO
• 18   Additional Components for SAP Process Orchestration
• 19   Landscape Setup Considerations
• A   Orchestration Outlook
• B   The Authors
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes