Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide > Planning Workflow Processes >

Understanding Workflow Process Requirements

A workflow process operates on business objects and business components. Usually, each workflow process is associated with a business object.

A workflow process consists of various tasks. There are many predefined tasks that can be used when you define a process. Some examples of the predefined tasks are:

• Notifications. Sending an email, page, or fax.
• Siebel Operations. Inserting or updating information in the Siebel database.
• Integration Messages. Requesting to send or receive data from an external system.
• Assignment. Requesting Assignment Manager to assign an object.
• Navigation. Navigating a user to a specific view.
• Server Request. Requesting the Siebel Server Request Broker to run a server process.

Except for Siebel Operations, all of the above tasks are invoked by calling a method on a business service. Siebel has predefined these business services so they can be used in workflow processes.

You may determine a specialized task that you are interested in calling in your workflow, such as "calculate credit risk." Specialized tasks can be added by defining a custom business service. Workflow Processes can call both predefined and custom business services. For more information on defining custom business services, see Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume II.