A process is the major unit of logic in IBM® Business Process Manager.
It is the container for all components of a business process definition
(BPD). Modeling a good process that matches your requirements is at
the core of Process Designer.
Getting started
Before you start to build processes using IBM Process Designer,
you need to understand the Designer interface and the tools and components
available within the interface.
Creating a business process definition (BPD)
To model a process, you must create a business process
definition (BPD). A BPD is a reusable model of a process, defining
what is common to all runtime instances of that process model.
Building services
Use services to implement the activities in a business
process definition (BPD). When a BPD starts and the tasks within it
are invoked, services perform the required functions.
Business objects and variables
In Process Designer,
variables capture the business data that is used by activities in
a business process definition or by steps in services such as integration
services or human services.
Modeling events
Events in IBM® Business Process Manager can be triggered
by a due date passing, an exception, or a incoming message from an
external system. You can add events to your BPDs that can occur at
the beginning, during, or at the end of a process. Use events to track
data, manage errors, and retrieve information about the execution
of your BPDs.
Using external implementations
You can create external implementations for activities
that are handled by applications outside of IBM Business Process Manager.
For example, you can model an activity that is run by a custom Eclipse
RCP or Microsoft .NET application.
Integrating with other systems
You can configure IBM BPM processes to communicate with
an external system to retrieve, update, or insert data. And, external
applications can call into IBM BPM to initiate services. You can manage
inbound and outbound communication with external systems using undercover
agents, web services, and integration services.
Configuring conditional activities
You can use conditional activities to model steps which
are either skipped or performed during run time based on the values
of specific process variables. The decision to skip or perform a conditional
activity can be made by the runtime user or programmatically, based
on scripted rules.