Designing Efficient BPM Applications: A Process-Based Guide for Beginners

by Christine McKinty, Antoine Mottier

Overview

Looking for efficiency gains in your business? If you’re a business analyst, this practical guide will show you how to design effective business process management (BPM) applications. Every business uses business processes—these everyday tasks help you gain and retain customers, stay profitable, and keep your operations infrastructure functioning.

BPM specialists Christine McKinty and Antoine Mottier show you step-by-step how to turn a simple business procedure into an automated, process-based application. Using hands-on examples, you’ll quickly learn how to create an online process that’s easy to use. Each chapter builds on earlier material.

You don’t have to have any programming experience to design business processes—and if you have skills in designing workflows and understanding human interactions with processes, you already have a headstart.

Through the course of this book, you will:

• Build a prototype of an application page
• Create the most frequent use flow in a process, and define the data model
• Generate real process forms and produce the first version of the application
• Connect your application to external information systems, and then build and test the complete application

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491924716
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/24/2016
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

A skilled technical author specializing in Business Process Management software, Chris has been working at Bonitasoft since 2012. Prior to that, she worked as technical writer and user-centered design specialist in the UK and France for international businesses and as an independent consultant.



Chris is based near Grenoble, France. Her passions are people, technology, people using technology—and singing.

Antoine has several years experience as a BPM solutions consultant at Bonitasoft, working with businesses large and small. He is now also Training Manager, responsible for delivering packaged and bespoke training for customers and partners, and for internal training for the consulting team. He's an expert on how users really use BPMN, including the common mistakes and misunderstandings, and on how it should be used to get the best results.



Antoine lives in Grenoble, France, and spends his free time in the surrounding mountains, biking, hiking, or skiing.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 Recognizing Your Business Processes 1

What Is a Business Process? 1

What Is Not a Process? 1

Examples of Process-Based Applications 2

Vacation Management 2

Recruitment and Onboarding 3

Procure to Pay 3

Build to Order 3

Online Shopping 3

Business Continuity 3

Document Approval 4

Travel Management 4

Business Process Management 4

Business Process Model and Notation 4

Process Automation 5

Process Efficiency 5

Summary 6

2 Preparing Your System 7

Example Application: Vacation Management 7

Downloads 9

Installing Bonita BPM Community Edition 10

Starting Bonita BPM Studio 11

Diagram Editor 12

UI Designer 13

Summary 14

3 Getting Started 15

Create the Application Prototype 15

Create the Page and Add the Introduction 16

Add My Vacation Information 17

Add Team Vacation Information 21

Create Your First Process Diagram 27

Run the Process 30

Summary 31

4 Managing Starts and Stops 33

User Experience Description 33

Application Page with Vacation Statement 33

Vacation Request Form 34

Vacation Modification Option 34

Vacation Cancellation Option 34

Notification for Manager of Pending Request 34

Vacation Request Review Form 35

Team Vacation Statement for Manager 35

Calendar Interaction 35

HR Tracking of Refusals 35

Component Definitions 36

Home Page 36

Vacation Request Process 36

Updating the Process Diagram 37

Updating the Human Tasks 37

Adding Notification Tasks 38

Summary 39

5 Assigning Tasks 41

Actors 42

Filtering 42

Example 43

Updating the Process Diagram 43

Tips for Updating a Diagram 45

Assigning Actors and Filters 46

Summary 46

6 Using Data 47

Data Use Patterns 47

Defining the Business Data Model 48

Data Model Design Choices 48

Business Objects 49

Queries 51

Indexes 52

Initialize Vacation Available for Employees 53

Define Variables 54

Specify Information Needed by a Process 55

Running the Process with Temporary Forms 57

Setting Initial Values for Variables 58

Updating Vacation Available 61

Organization Data 62

Summary 62

7 Creating Process Forms 63

Vacation Request Form 63

Manager Review Form 65

Summary 68

8 Managing Decisions 69

Gateway Types 69

Exclusive Gateway 69

Inclusive Gateway 70

Parallel Gateway 70

Best Practice 70

Update the Diagram 71

Add Operations to Update the VacationRequest 72

Add Flow Conditions 73

Make the no Flow Parallel 73

Close Flows from Request approved? 74

Updated Diagram 75

Summary 76

9 Planning for Escalations and Exceptions 77

Escalations 77

Add a Reminder 78

Add an Escalation 79

Exceptions 82

Summary 83

10 Building the Application 85

Deploy and Run Processes 85

Update the Vacation Statement 86

Create the Application 88

Test the Application 90

Summary 91

11 Managing Interruptions 93

Modify a Request 93

Add Modify Option to the Application Page 94

Create the Tahiti-ModifyPendingVacationRequest Process 95

Cancel a Request 99

Add a Cancel Option to the Application Page 100

Define the Tahiti-CancelVacationRequest Process 101

Update the Tahiti-NewVacationRequest Process 108

Create Cancellation Process Forms 109

Testing Modify and Cancel 112

Summary 112

12 Connecting to Other Systems 113

Email Connectors 113

Email Connector Parameters 114

Email Connectors in Tahiti-NewVacationRequest 114

Email Connectors in Tahiti-CancelVacationRequest 119

Calendar Connectors 122

Calendar Connector Parameters 122

Date Formatter Groovy Script 123

Update calendar request pending 124

Update calendar request modified 126

Update calendar approved 127

Update calendar request refused 129

Update calendar request cancelled 129

Summary 130

13 Finishing the Application 131

Updating Process Forms 131

Update the Application 132

Deploy the Processes 133

Test the Application 133

Summary 134

14 Deploying the Application 135

Testing 135

Unit Test 135

Workflow Execution 136

User Acceptance Testing 136

Setting Up the Environment 137

Future Enhancements 137

Next Steps 138

Index 139