This chapter contains the following topics:
Workflow management offers a powerful means of automating various components of the work order life cycle across the entire enterprise. Based on a set of procedural rules and triggering events, documents, information, and tasks pass efficiently from one participant to another for action, and minimal user involvement is required. For example, you can use a workflow process to:
Route a work order for approval.
Commit inventory to a work order.
Run the capacity plan for a work order.
Send messages to appropriate people regarding the progress of a work order.
In addition, the system enables you to:
Define any number of workflow processes, depending on business needs.
Attach any workflow process to any given event within an application.
Execute conditional processing, which is logic that depends on supplied criteria, such as currency amount, status, and priority.
A workflow process contains activities and related subprocesses that are specific to a particular function that you want to automate. The Work Orders system includes predefined workflow processes that are specific to the work order life cycle. You can modify or add to these processes, if necessary. Typically, you need to customize workflow processes to meet the needs of the organization. An example of a predefined process for Work Orders is the process for work order approval.
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Note: For any given setup task, demonstration data is provided. You can use the available data or customize it to meet business needs. |
Workflow processes refer to processes that you have set up to be handled through scripted workflow. For each process that you define, you can:
Set up criteria that indicates the start and end of the process.
Determine the workflow activities involved in the process, such as sending an approval message, calling an application, or launching a subprocess.
Determine the relevant data that the system requires to complete the process.
Determine the path, such as an approval route, that a process takes, and whether the process depends on some conditional value, such as work order status, amount, or date. Activity conditions determine the next workflow activity in the process.
You can set up a hierarchy of processes by creating nested subprocesses so that one process calls another. This procedure is especially useful when you need to reuse components within other processes. For example, the initial workflow process for work orders determines the document type of the work order and calls other processes that are based on the document type, such as the process to determine the work order type.
Routes define the path along which a workflow process moves a work order. Depending on business needs, a route can be relatively simple and sequential, or increasingly complex, with joins or splits, parallel routing, iterative routing (such as a loop), and so on.
Process rules define what information is to be routed and to whom. For example, you can set up rules that define conditions that a work order must meet before a workflow process advances the order to the next activity in the process, as well as rules that govern who receives an approval request. The system uses these process rules:
Activity conditions determine the next activity, based on information that you set up in an attribute data structure, such as work order status.
Recipient rules determine the recipient to whom the system routes messages.
As with routes, you determine the complexity of rules according to business needs. For example, you can set up logic by which a work order can progress to the next step only when predefined threshold values have been met.
Workflow activities refer to the specific actions within a given process, such as sending a request for approval or committing inventory. In addition to the Start activity, which every process must include, you can attach other types of activities to a process, such as:
Function
Interactive application
Batch application
Run executable
Message
Halt process
Process
The primary data structure contains the data that makes an instance of a process unique from another instance. In Work Orders, where workflow processes are set up primarily for events in the work order life cycle, the primary data structure typically consists of the work order number.
To avoid system errors, do not use multiple data items within a data structure.
Attribute data structures contain all pieces of data that a given process and any activity within the process need to complete the workflow. Workflow management uses the attribute data structure to communicate between activities within a process.