# What is a Business Process?

Companies large and small have business processes that they regularly execute. Let's just call them "processes" for brevity's sake. Insurance companies have processes to process a claim. Banks have processes to approve loans. The government have processes to award contracts. 

# What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

The goals of Business Process Management are:

* More Reliablibility
* Faster Process Execugtion
* Reduced Training Requirements
* Incremental Process Improvement
* Provide Process Metrics
* Cost Savings

Business Process Managemnt is implemented with the aid of a BPM platform of some sort. There are are dozens of commerical BPM platforms and they can be quite expensive, potentially costing millions of dollars a year.

# When is BPM Applicable

This is difficult to answer exactly, but BPM may be applicable when:

* Processes are performed on a regular basis.
* Process are well defined.
* Multiple business groups and people participate in process execution.

# Mozart

Mozart will be a open source BPM platform. It is written in Elixir and is in the early stages of development. A distinguishing characteristic is that, instead of using BPNM2, it will provide a text-based BPM modelling language that is highly readable by process experts with no programming experience. The modelling language is inspired by AWS Step Functions. See [AWS Step Functions](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/?icmpid=docs_homepage_appintegration).

The modeling elements currently supported are:

| Element Type               |  Description |
|-----|-----|
| User Task               | Performed by a user |
| Service Task            | Performed by calling a service. |
| Subprocess Task         | Performed by calling a subprocess. |
| Timer Task              | Waits for expiration of a timer. |
| Receive Task            | Waits for a subscribed PubSub event. |
| Send Task               | Sends a PubSub event. |
| Decision Task           | Perform by evaluating a decision block (Tablex) |
| Exclusive Gate          | Selects one of many process paths. |
| Parallel Gate           | Initiates two or more process paths. |
| Parallel Join           | Sychronizes on completion of two or more process paths. |

## Current Development Status

* There is a working process execution engine.
* Each business process, including each subprocess, runs in it's own GenServer process.
* Example business process definitions are in test_models.ex_doc
* Business process models are, for now, written using Elxir data structues. (See Todo Section)
* The examples can be run with "mix test".

## Installation

The package can be installed
by adding `mozart` to your list of dependencies in `mix.exs`:

```elixir
def deps do
  [
    {:mozart, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end
```


## Todo

* Publish 0.1 release to hex.
* Develop a textual business processs modeling language with will be translated at runtime into native Elixir data structures. The language will be highly readable to process modelers with no programming experience.
* Develop GUIs for:
  * Runtime trouble shooting and monitoring.
  * User and group administration.
  * User task assignment and execution.

## Providing Feedback

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, etc. feel free to open issues in GitHub.