By Rashid N. Khan
The first step in a business process is a special case. The completion of the first step causes a new instance of the business process to be started. In order to support this capability, the first step has some additional properties that are useful for process design. That's the topic of this month's column.
Initiation Rights
The right to initiate a business process may be reserved for a subset of the employees of the company. Not everyone may be allowed to start new instances. By definition, the recipients of the first step have the right to initiate new incidents of the process. Business process designers can specify an individual or a group that can complete the first step, and therefore only these recipients can cause new incidents to be started.
Anonymous Users Initiation
A company may want a large number of unknown users to be able to start a business process instance. For example, a government organization may develop a business process to allow members of the general public to issue request for services from its Web site. For such applications it is necessary to assign the first step to an anonymous user who is not identified a priori. Such users may need some unique method of identification and authentication that the business process management (BPM) solution must be able to provide.
Application Initiation
In some cases a business process has to be started by another application. For example, a company may have an accounts receivables process that has to collect money from delinquent accounts. This process has to be triggered automatically by the accounting software when it determines that an account is delinquent. A BPM solution has to provide flexible means of starting processes from other applications.
Periodic Initiation
For many business processes it is necessary to start a new incident periodically. For example, time sheets must be completed biweekly and sales forecasts may be required at the start of each month. Instead of relying on users, it is much better for the BPM solution to do this automatically. Therefore, modern BPM solutions provide a method of specifying periodic initialization. If configured for periodic initialization, the BPM solution initiates new incidents of the process automatically at the specified periodic intervals.
Useful Links
This article is an excerpt from Rashid Khan's Business Process Management: A Practical Guide. Order your copy here:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/yDQ
Ultimus
http://www.ultimus.com
Rashid N. Khan is the founder and Chief Technical and Strategy Officer of Ultimus Inc., a pioneer in business process management and workflow automation. Prior to establishing Ultimus, founded Sintech Inc., a leader in advanced software for mechanical testing. Rashid sold Sintech to MTS Systems in 1989, where he worked for a five years as a vice president and general manager. During this period he took the company through ISO 9000 certification. This experience made him aware of the need for business process management and workflow automation. Rashid obtained two undergraduate degrees from MIT in computer science and political science. Khan is the author of Business Process Management: A Practical Guide, has published numerous articles and spoken at a number of events. Contact Rashid N. Khan at info (at) ultimus.com or visit http://www.ultimus.com.
