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Siebel Workflow Deployment Planning

Siebel Workflow lets you define, manage, and enforce your business processes or workflows. It allows you to design complex workflow processes and automate the enforcement of business policies and procedures. This module includes the following:

• Workflow Processes. This module lets you define your company's business processes using a familiar flowcharting interface. A workflow process consists of one or more process steps, such as start steps, subprocesses, decision points, and tasks. You configure workflow processes using the Process Designer in Siebel Tools.
• Workflow Policies. This module lets you define policies that can act as triggers to execute a process. A policy consists of conditions and actions. When policy conditions are met, the policy action executes the relevant process.
• State Models. This module is used for defining business object states and state transitions.

For information on using and administering Siebel Workflow, see Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide.

Each user request to the Workflow Process Manager starts a new thread. However, sessions for Object Manager components (such as EAI Object Manager or Application Object Manager) that may invoke workflow processes are cached and reused for subsequent requests. When you size a system, the maximum number of workflow tasks you expect to have active at a given time helps determine the maximum number of Object Manager sessions created for Siebel applications.

The exact CPU and memory consumption of each task depends on the actions performed in your workflow processes. To estimate CPU and memory consumption in your production environment, run a single task, measure its resource consumption, and make an estimation based on your maximum concurrent sessions. Take session caching into account when making these measurements.

If you need a large number of sessions, you may want to run Workflow Process Manager on multiple Siebel Server machines. You can then load-balance requests across the Siebel Servers. If you plan to run a significant number of tasks per server (such as 100 or more), you may also want to run multiple multithreaded processes.

If you are going to run several different types of workflows, run each type in a separate process. Doing so makes it easier to monitor the overall CPU and memory usage of each process type.

The number of multithreaded processes and the number of tasks for each process are controlled through the parameters MaxMTServers (Maximum MT Servers), MinMTServers (Minimum MT Servers), and MaxTasks (Maximum Tasks).

These parameters are for each Siebel Server. For example, MaxMTServers refers to how many multithreaded processes to run on each Siebel Server machine.

Business Integration Manager and Business Integration Batch Manager have been deprecated, so if you were using either one in your business processes you need to replace them with Workflow Process Manager or Workflow Process Batch Manager, respectively.

If a workflow policy action is set up to use the Run Integration Process workflow policy program, which invokes the Business Integration Manager (BusIntMgr) component, create a new workflow policy action using the Run Workflow Process workflow policy program. The new workflow policy action will instead invoke Workflow Process Manager. Delete the old workflow policy action from the workflow policy, add the new workflow policy action to the workflow policy, and restart Workflow Monitor Agent tasks.

For detailed information about server components, see Siebel System Administration Guide.