Business Process Subprocesses

Subprocesses are an integral concept in Sterling B2B Integrator, because building a business process once, but using it as a subprocess in multiple other business processes, simplifies future maintenance.

Any business process can be a subprocess. The term subprocess indicates a business process that is invoked as part of another business process (the initiating process is called the parent process).

When you modify a process model that is called as subprocess by multiple business processes, you make one set of modifications – in the subprocess – but all of the parent business processes use the updated subprocess when they run.

In this way, subprocesses work with the design concept of reusability; by identifying simple units of work that appear in more than one business process, and designing your subprocesses to be as generic as possible, you can save a great deal of time. The following illustration shows how a subprocess fits into a larger business process model: