Oracle BPM to Replace a System

Question

Greetings,
I am considering replacing an existing mission critical back office system with Oracle BPM. I've talked with references provided by Oracle, and in all cases these co's used BPM to improve processes and orchestrate workflow across systems, NOT replace a system.
Where would our business logic reside??? Would the system be a collection of components running inside BPM?
Although this could be done, to me, this doesn't seem like the intended purpose of a BPM tool. It just doesn't sit well with me that we'd use a business modeling and process tool to replace a mission critical solution.
Thanks

Answer 1

Regarding your question about where the logic in a BPM process would reside, rather than rip and replace, you might want to first consider reusing assets from your existing applications inside an Oracle BPM process.
If you have a service bus, the components would be exposed to and invoked by Oracle BPM via as a web service. If you don't have a service bus, you could expose components directly inside of Oracle BPM if they are Java POJOs, web services, .NET assemblies, or databases. If you go this path, you'll lose the loose coupling SOA provides but you'll get your project going.
If you don't have component assets available for reuse, you can build logic inside automatic activities in a process. Again, if your developers would prefer to develop the components in Java or .NET, these could be exposed to the process and invoked when needed from inside the process.
Consider also exposing business rules in a rules engine if you have one. You can invoke these rules from inside a process. If you don't already have a rules engine, Oracle BPM has a simple business rules editor and rules engine that comes with it now. The benefit of this is that you are not hard coding rules inside a process. Instead you expose the business rules to the business people. This makes your processes more agile and easier to change. You won't have to wait for IT to change the process and redeploy the process into production. Business rules take effect immediately after the business person changes the rule.
hth,
Dan