About Business Processes

A business process is any goal-driven, ordered flow of activities that accomplishes a business objective. In Sterling B2B Integrator, business process refers to the automated implementation of business objectives.

Invoicing, order fulfillment, and updating employee information are all examples of business processes.

Most processing activities of Sterling B2B Integrator are predicated upon defined business processes—the custom-designed programming instructions you provide to Sterling B2B Integrator, to perform your required activities. The fact that you can customize create business processes in Sterling B2B Integrator means that you control:

• Which Sterling B2B Integrator components perform the activities
• What rules, constraints, or decision points play a role in the execution of the activities
• The degree of available visibility into processing
• The amount and type of data the system records about the activities

The Sterling B2B Integrator components and features are designed to provide a variety of options for configuring your activities. As a result, you often have multiple choices available when determining how to achieve a given goal. With so many choices, you can create business processes that are expressly suited to your organization's requirements—not only to complete the required work, but also to maximize processing efficiency for all of your processes, streamline your ongoing maintenance tasks, and facilitate monitoring and tracking operations.

For example, some of your processes may require quick turnaround, while others may involve batch processing not tied to a time limit. You can configure efficient processing of both types of processes by running low-priority batch processes during slow periods, which frees system resources for the higher-priority items that run immediately. Customizing your processing activity for maximum efficiency keeps system resources available for enhanced management options such as archiving, data persistence and document tracking.