Process Automation with Process Cloud Service – Part 3 (Workflow)

In this blog series (part1, part2) I am covering step-by-step how to build and deploy an automated business process using the process cloud service.

At this moment we can visually understand the workflow, but with the exception of the Form Start activity there is no real implementation underneath the BPMN notation.

Approve

This activity is meant to define the who, the how and the when about the approval step.

An assignee can be a person or a group. The choice here is whether the approval should be handled in sequence, parallel or with a single assignee.

For this use case I pick the “Any Single Assignee”.

Assignees

You can assign the human task to a specific user, to a group of users, to the users in a certain role.

You have 2 options:

• Build the list with names and expressions
• Lane participants

With Names and Expression you can define user/group that is responsible to act (approve/reject) the requests. In the Single Assignee option, the first one to act on the request will make the process continue.

The second option is Lane Participants , where the actual participants can be defined at a later stage in the runtime configurations.

Actions

APPROVE and REJECT are the default Actions. Other actions can be specified, such as HOLD and MOREINFO. They need to be all CAPS and separated with a comma.

Pressing the little person icon on the right side brings even more Actions. By default they are all selected.

Task Identifier

The title and the summary are used to easily identify the task at end. They will appear in the user’s task list, and can be used for filtering.

Reminders

What if the approver(s) does not act on the request? Well, for that we have reminders, which allow to configure intervals of actions to remind users.

• No Reminder
• Remind Once
• Remind Twice
• Remind Three Times

You can then specify the interval in month/day/hour/minutes.

Escalation

What if the users don’t act even with the reminders? For that we have escalations. The escalation path (as in, who will receive this) can be defined in the run time configurations.

Here one can decide how may escalation and the interval for them.

This activity also allows to choose for expiration, or renewal.

Notification

Notification is a crucial piece here, as it enables the communication to the involved parties in the process.

“send a notification email to the task assignee when an event such as assignment, approval, escalation, reminder, and reassignment occurs. A notification email contains outcomes defined for a task, such as Approve or Reject. Assignees can click on these outcomes to complete tasks using their email clients, without having to sign in to the application.”

Decision Gateway

In the decision gateway we capture the action from the Approve activity and decide which path to take based on the decision value (APPROVE/REJECT).

Conclusion

We now have a solid implementation of the business process, with a starting Form that will capture the information to be send for approval.

We configured the Assignees, Approvers, Reminders, Escalations and Notifications, all within the same activity.

Next we should put this first draft to testing!