BPE Architecture

BPE’s architecture has been designed for interoperability with third-party systems. BPE is logically positioned between the order capture system and the billing and CRM system. The order capture system may be a simple web page designed for use by your sales and customer service agents or a fully-featured customer facing web shop with advanced order capture functions.

Our BPE is based on a service-orientated architecture (SOA) and operates as both a provider and requester of web services. It exposes a web service to the order capture system, which provides a service enabling an order to be passed to the BPE. Similarly, BPE is able to use the web services provided by the billing system and other external systems during the processing of an order. BPE provides a framework on which a customer-defined business process can be created. The process definition describes the services required to fulfil a particular order, such as performing a credit reference for a broadband order, the order in which the services need to be called and the conditional logic that controls the flow through the order process.

The conditional logic can use the outcome of a previous step to control the subsequent handling of an order. When an order is received at the BPE, the XML document containing the order details is validated and stored within its persistence layer. A confirmation response is sent to the order capture system to indicate receipt of the order and its validity. During peak periods, the orders are queued prior to being processed.

BPE then uses the process definition to expedite the services required for the particular type of order; ie different processes can be defined for different order types. The order details are passed to the billing and CRM system to enable the information to be immediately available to customer services agents. As each stage of the order is completed, the BPE updates the information available through the CRM.

Should the process definition dictate that manual intervention is needed, such as a referred credit check, the BPE creates an appropriate workflow event to alert the customer service agent. When accepted, the automatic order processing is resumed as normal.

BPE Architecture Diagram