By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/26/2012 9:57 PM
Most manual processes are automated around business data. The process always works with one or more business objects/entities within the process. For example, in a Change Notice application, the CN Number is stored within the process and used by many steps to perform all kinds of operations. Process may use the CN number to perform some of the following operations:
Get a value from the Change Notice form
Set the status of the Change Notice
Route the Change Notice for approvals
Attach a file to the Change Notice
Some of the larger business processes might involve many business objects being used within the process. In the case of an application that tracks inventory throughout a manufacturing process, there could be several pieces of business data, such as lot numbers, inventory items, warehouse ids, shipment tags.
Today, business process automation does not have an end point, it’s an iterative process, where the process gets designed, executed, optimized. Most bpm products...
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/25/2012 10:27 AM
Many Workflow/bpm products out there have many limitations or walls that you run into when start to use them. cDevWorkflow was built around the concept of “Workflow without walls”. We wanted to make sure that cDevWorkflow does not run into these following limitations that other products do:
Cannot extend workflow tables, product stops working
Configuration changes stored in an xml file. If the xml file becomes invalid, product stops working
Bpm steps are very product centric and cannot communicate with external systems
Bpm steps cannot perform complex operations such as expression evaluation
Custom steps cannot be built
Upgrading from one version to another is a nightmare, configuration changes and database changes must be made manually
APIs don’t support extended properties
Difficult to get customer support
Steps with limited # of values that can be configured
Above are some of the limitations that you run into with some of the other high price...
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/24/2012 6:27 PM
A business process can be automated in many ways, success to bpm is to evaluate runtime information and optimize the process. By analyzing bpm runtime information, many bottle necks can be found. Many bottle necks are common to user interactive task steps; here are some of the common ones:
Approvals taking too much time – let’s say if Joe in finance gets 100 tasks per day to approve, this might be too much for Joe and some of the tasks may take 4-5 hours to get approved. If the task was routed to multiple people in finance for approval, the 100 tasks might get distributed to multiple people from finance. This could significantly reduce the time take to approve the task.
Unnecessary approvals – a process may route to a user for approvals, even though an approval is not required. For example, if a validation error is found on a document and needs to be routed back to the originator of the document, the routing back to the originator shouldn't’t be approved by another user.
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/23/2012 11:04 AM
Dynamic processing within bpm is very interesting since this is where the Workflow Definition differs from the Workflow Instance. In most cases the Workflow instance is a 100% copy of the definition. But in this case, the instance changes or builds itself and executes.
Let’s say if your workflow had to figure out N number of items to perform, and those N number of items had to be performed in parallel. This is a scenario that cannot be designed using a Workflow definition, since the N number of items are determined at the execution of the instance. If it was serial, no issues, this can be easily handled within a loop construct.
cDevWorkflow performs dynamic processing at many levels. But the most powerful step that performs dynamics processing is the dynamic subworkflow step. This step is passed in a bunch of keys at execution time, based on the # of keys, it builds itself into multiple paths at runtime and executes these paths simultaneously.
Dynamic processing is a very powerful concept...
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/16/2012 2:14 PM
cDevWorkflow has grown feature wise and in out of the box engine steps. cDevWorkflow now has 17 out of the box steps that provide very powerful functionality. Many of our customers has ask for Step/Action Categorization. Version 3.5 has it now......
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/11/2012 9:37 PM
cDevWorkflow 3.5 has many new features/upgrades, so we had to blog about it........
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By Dileepa Wijayanayake on
1/3/2012 4:00 PM
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