Business automations

A decision, document processing, workflow, or external business automation (automation) is a collection of artifacts that fulfill a business purpose. You can publish some automations as automation services that you can call and reuse in a consistent way. When published, the automation service becomes discoverable across Business Automation Studio to help you drive productivity and customer experiences.

  • A decision automation provides decision-modeling capabilities to help you capture and automate repeatable decisions. Each callable decision automation contains the following artifacts or asset types:
    • Decision model - The representation of a decision that contains a diagram. The diagram describes a decision, its subdecisions, the data that is required to make these decisions, and how they are related to each other. It includes rules and decision tables that describe the decision logic.
    • Data model - The representation of business concepts in the form of data types. Use data models to describe all the data that you need to make your decisions.
    • Predictive model - The representation of a prediction based on a machine learning model. Decision models use these predictions.
    You can expose a decision as an automation service, but only for authoring.
  • A document processing automation enhances your ability to automate work by letting you intelligently process information easily and accurately without data science skills. Combining content, data capture, and workflow capabilities, a document processing automation helps you easily design document models and customized extraction flow by using
    • Document classification
    • Metadata extraction
    • Validation and correction services, with human interaction for fields with lower confidence levels of the extracted fields
    • Work-assignments prioritization based on extracted data
    • Standardized data modeling, enabling consistency across your automation and document-processing applications
    A document processing automation can't be exposed as an automation service.
  • A workflow automation contains workflows, which can be process and case definitions, artifacts, and asset types that make up processes, service flows, and business automation and case capabilities within operations, providing visibility into each step.
    Note: After you import the projects into Business Automation Studio, convert them for use in Cloud Pak for Business Automation on the Project Conversion tab in Workflow Designer. For more information, see Converting project artifacts.
    You can run a workflow directly or call it from automations and external clients. You can also publish a workflow as an automation service that you can call and reuse in a consistent way, for example from a user interface. For more information, see the IBM Business Automation Workflow documentation. In that documentation, versions are called snapshots.
  • An external automation contains implementations from outside Business Automation Studio that you can publish as automation services you can call and reuse in a consistent way, for example from a user interface.