Creating workflows

Using workflows allows more strict control of the Product Master Server process.

A workflow consists of a set of steps that make up a single use case or business process. A collaboration area associates a workflow to a specific catalog or hierarchy.

To apply a workflow to the entries in a given container, a collaboration area is created for that workflow and that container. Entries in that container (the source container) can be checked-out to that collaboration area, which means that they move through the steps that are defined in the workflow for each business process to be performed. At the end of the workflow, the changed entry can be checked-in, which means the attribute values are copied back into the source container.

The following three roles are involved in creating workflows and collaboration areas:

Solution developers: The solution developer is responsible for designing the representation of the company's business processes. Typically this is a business analyst.
Collaboration area user: The user who performs the business process on the items and categories. There can be many different roles and users for this area.
Collaboration area administrator: The collaboration area administrator is responsible for checking out items and categories and to maintain the items and categories in a collaboration area. The collaboration area administrator resolves any issues during the Fixit step.
Important: The Fixit step is only visible to an user who is a collaboration area administrator.

Workflows

A workflow represents a business process in the PIM application. By creating collaboration areas based on this workflow, users of IBM® Product Master can perform their business processes by moving the entries through workflow steps.

Collaboration areas

A collaboration area implements a business process in the PIM application. The collaboration area can be used to operate task lists, display status of entries, and can also be used for auditing and reporting.

A collaboration area is the application of a specific workflow to a catalog or hierarchy. A collaboration area is empty when it is created even if the container has entries. Entries that need to be processed according to the workflow can be checked out into the collaboration area. After an entry is checked out, the performer of each step of the process can modify and enrich the attributes of the entry according to the workflow that was used to create the collaboration area.

Important: Ensure that you open the collaboration area and click Refresh whenever attributes (for example, catalog scripts or link attributes) are modified on the associated source catalog.

Relationship between workflows and collaboration areas

You can associate a single catalog or hierarchy with multiple workflows so that you have multiple collaboration areas with different rules. Multiple workflows are useful when the same set of items needs to be processed by more than one set of rules. For example, the rules might allow the description of an item to be changed by the supplier, and the rules might require that the descriptions not exceed a certain length and be approved by someone within the business. However, the price of an item might have stricter controls than the description does for who can update it, and updates to the price might need more approval steps.

All the attributes of an entry might not be modifiable within a collaboration area. The list of modifiable attributes is computed from the workflow definition that is associated with the collaboration area. Therefore, if multiple collaboration areas have disjointed lists of modifiable attributes from one another, then the entry can be checked-out to all of them at the same time.

In this example, you might have one collaboration area that modifies only price and another collaboration area that modifies the description. In this case, an item can be checked out for price update and description update at the same time. In addition, the item can be checked out into any other collaboration area that does not allow for the update of the price or of the description.