#914 - OIC - End to End Business Process Automation

Introduction

I introduced this topic in a previous post, but now to a concrete application of what was discussed. Here we have a scenario of documents being uploaded in a content management system. These documents could be purchase orders, invoices etc. and they need to be processed automatically, as much as possible. This post details how such could be implemented with OIC. I have added an extra step for human approvals, as this is often the case; there always are occasions where some documents need to be validated before further processing can take place. The graphic below illustrates the demo flow I have created. Documents are uploaded to a CMS. An OIC integration can be triggered each time a document is created, or else we could have an OIC scheduled job polling the CMS on a regular basis for new files.

The OIC integration passes the document to OCI AI-Vision. The latter parses the document, returning document type, key values etc. In my case, all invoices need to be approved by finance before being created in Netsuite. In my example I only implement the Invoice "route", but I'm sure we can all extrapolate from that. 

CMS

As in the previous post, I am using OCI Object Storage as my "CMS". Naturally, in the real world, you would be using a proper CMS such as Oracle Content Management. Object Storage can emit an event - new object created - and this event can raise an OCI Notification, which results in an OIC integration being triggered. As mentioned above, OIC could also poll the CMS for new documents on a regular basis. The mechanics of setting up Object Storage -> Events Service -> Notification Service-> OIC are discussed in the previous post on this topic. 

OCI AI Vision

OCI AI Vision Service has also been discussed in the previous post on this topic. Net, net, the service has a rich REST api you can leverage to analyze documents. Here is an example with my sample invoice.  

First the invoice - 

then the analysis -

The Response json is worth reviewing as this is what needs to be parsed in the OIC Integration.

 

OIC Integration

The main integration can be implemented as an app driven or scheduled orchestration - in my case, app driven. I create a REST connection to OCI Object Storage and use this to retrieve the document(s) - 

Next step, as you can see, is to invoke OCI AI Vision via an OIC REST connection to analyze the document. 

I implement a SWITCH action to parse the result from OCI AI Vision -

Above, is the Invoice path. The For Each loops are used to extract the result - key fields etc.   

Finally, I invoke the OIC Process - Approve Invoices.

OIC Process

I can easily add documents to the Process - in other words, OIC integration can invoke the process and add the original invoice to the Process documents folder -  

 

So let's test!

Test

I upload an invoice to my "CMS" -

The Integration is triggered and returns - 

I check my OIC Process Tasklist - 

The form shown above is the generated default, naturally, this can be prettified. Again, the original invoice image can be attached to this process instance as a document, if required.

 

Summary

The rich toolkit that is OIC, together with the power of OCI Services, enables one to easily automate  End to End Business Processes. The combination of capabilities that OIC provides 

- app integration

- process automation

- out-of-the-box business user facing dashboards with Insight

- low code app native mobile and web development with Visual Builder

- trading partner management with B2B

is unique, and, when one combines this with the rich set of OCI services, the results are unbeatable.