Managing Workflows

Workflows define the online sequence of steps necessary to accomplish a business objective. The steps may be used to guide someone through a business process such as to submit an application for membership, to register for an event or to handle an appeals process.

The workflow system adopts industry standards which describe processes as sequences of Places and Transitions. Markers are used to identify the current Place(s) in a process. The sequences may include conditional branching or parallel (concurrent) processes.

Imagine a game board on which players advance their personal markers with each turn. Each space on the board would be a stopping place. The action taken at each stop to advance would be a transition step. A step may be to throw dice to determine how far to advance. It may be pull a card of instructions to follow. The marker indicates the current place of each player. A turn is not complete until a marker has settled on a new stopping place.

• Places (or Stops) – These are “stopping” points throughout the process. Some processes may be involve concurrent steps. In such cases there may be multiple markers for each concurrent stop (like having multiple players in the same board game who may not be on the same place on the board).
• Transitions (or Steps) – These are the transitional actions that need to be taken to move from one place to the next. A marker does not get moved from one place to the next until the required transition is completed. For example, if a form must be completed to move from Place A (“awaiting form”) to Place B (“form completed”), the marker remains at Place A while after the form has been presented, partially completed, saved for future edit, etc. Only when the form has been completed and successfully submitted does the marker get moved to Place B.

Define the online sequence of steps necessary to accomplish a business objective. Submodules include:

• Overview – Define workflows for automating business processes. Workflows may consist of unique combinations of Places, Transitions, Actions, Events and Checklists.
  • Settings
    • Title
    • Description
    • Type
      • Workflow –
      • State Machine – Not implemented
    • Marker – Always set to “marker”
    • Template
    • Log Markers
  • Configuration
  • Places
    • Actions
    • Events
  • Transitions
    • Type
    • Events
  • Checklists – Non-sequential steps that may be completed in any order before advancing
    • Tasks
• Types – Define the types of Transitions that can be used in workflows.
• Events – Manage events that can be associated with Places and Transitions.

Obsolete: There are a growing number of possible Steps that can be included in a business process.