Creating a process

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A process is a set of related activities, along with supporting information such as data and content. The activities can be part of a structured flow, or ad-hoc activities that are not part of a structured flow.

About this task

A business process typically contains activities that are performed by various users or teams. At run time, a business user works with tasks that are created for the activities.

The following diagram illustrates the main tasks and activities that are associated with creating processes.

Interactive high-level flow diagram that illustrates the tasks that are associated with creating a process. Click a box for more information, or shift-click to open a new browser. Creating new process applications Running and debugging processes and services Modeling events Modeling events Adding activities to a BPD Converging and diverging flows Converging and diverging flows Adding lanes to a BPD Creating a team Subprocess types Selecting IBM Business Automation Workflow or an external ECM system to manage folders Creating user interfaces for business processes Creating user interfaces for business processes Services Building services Creating an unstructured (ad hoc) activity Modeling events Managing snapshots Installing, deploying, and undeploying applications in the runtime environment Administering processes with the Process Inspector

The activities in a process can access documents that are stored in a content management system. When you create a process, you decide how you want to access these documents.

You create a process from the Processes category in the library.

Procedure

  1. Select Processes from the library. Click +. In the Processes menu, select Process.
  2. In the New Process dialog, enter a name for the process.
  3. Click Finish. The editor opens in the Overview page. The process that you created is added in the Processes category.
  4. Optional: In the Overview page,
    • Use the Documentation field to add information about the process that you want to share with your development team.
    • If the process is generated from Case Builder, select Automatically sync shared business objects to ensure the content object will be synchronized properly in the process instance.
    • Because shared business objects are passed by value with a reference, which means that changes you make are saved and propagated to other instances that work with the same data, enable the automatic save and data synchronization functions by selecting Automatically sync shared business objects in the process or service.
  5. Assign teams whose members can start a process, or instance owner teams whose members can work with tasks in Process Portal.
    See Assigning teams to a process.
  6. Create the variables for the information that you want to share across activities.
  7. In the Definition page, add activities that define the business tasks and wire them according to the workflow.
  8. Create user interfaces for the process.
    See Creating user interfaces for processes.

Results

When you create a process, an inline user task is automatically added that is ready to run (if a dependency has been established between the process app and the UI toolkit). Information about inline user tasks is found in the topics Working with inline user tasks and Configuring coach templates for inline user tasks.