Designing Exception Paths

An exception is a mechanism used to interrupt or stop an order, or to redirect it to a task in the process to a different process. The choices are defined by the system administrator and identified by the exception statuses. Exceptions may be used to cancel an in-flight order, to add supplemental information to an order and redirect the order to an earlier task in the process, or to take other actions defined in the original process.

Exception statuses are user-defined statuses used to alter a process flow from anywhere in the process. The exceptions can be defined with restrictions that allow only specified workgroups, activities, or order type/sources (or combinations of these) to raise the exception.

Note:

If you have previously defined a process exception in the OSM Administrator, and intend to import it into Design Studio, you must ensure that:

You define (in the OSM Administrator Process Exception Definition tab) the status used in the process exception in any task that can initiate the exception.
You create a process exception restriction (in the OSM Administrator Process Exception Restriction tab) that specifies the tasks can raise the exception.

Exception paths are used in conjunction with the Redirect and End activities to define process exceptions:

The End activity stops the work order from continuing.
The Redirect activity redirects the work order to another task in the same process or to a different process.

Note:

End and Redirect activities cannot be defined as the source end of a path.

The following diagram illustrates how you might design some process exceptions in the Process editor:

Depiction of task processing exception paths.

Note:

In the Process editor, visual cues enable you to distinguish flow transitions from exception paths: exception paths are represented by an exception path source marker (lightning bolt icon) and a dashed line.

To model exception paths in the Process editor

To model a Stop exception, draw an exception path from an activity to an End activity.

Linking the path from the Start activity applies the exception to the entire process; linking from a task within the process applies the exception to that task.
To model a Redirect exception, draw an exception path from an activity to a Redirect activity. The Redirect activity supports both process-level and activity-level redirection.