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Workflow Deployment Planning

Siebel Business Process Designer is a customizable business application that allows you to define, manage, and enforce your business processes. It allows you to design complex workflow processes and automate the enforcement of business policies and procedures. For information on using and administering Siebel Business Process Designer, see Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide.

The application has the following modules:

• Workflow Processes. Allows you to 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.

  The Workflow Process Designer is located in Siebel Tools.

• Workflow Policies. Allows you to 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. Used for defining business object states and state transitions.

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 sizing a system, look at the maximum number of workflow tasks you expect to have active at a given time. This determines the maximum number of Object Manager sessions Siebel applications create.

Starting with Siebel 7.0, 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.

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, you should run each type in a separate process. This 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 per process are controlled through the parameters MaxMTServers (Maximum MT Servers), MinMTServers (Minimum MT Servers), and MaxTasks (Maximum Tasks).

These parameters are per Siebel Server. For example, MaxMTServers refers to how many multithreaded processes to run on each Siebel Server machine. For details, refer to Siebel System Administration Guide.