PeopleSoft Workflow Technology Implementation

Step One: Design a Workflow Application

Complete these main steps when designing a workflow application:

1. Analyze and document your business requirements.

2. Diagram the process flow.

3. Document the workflow object attributes for business processes, activities, steps, events, and email and worklist routings.

In the planning phase of your implementation, take advantage of all PeopleSoft sources of information, including the installation guides, PeopleTools documentation, and the product documentation specific to your applications.

After clearly designing your workflow requirements, you can proceed to building the workflow.

Step Two: Build Supporting Definitions

If the applications required for your workflow do not already exist, build the definitions that you need for fields, records, pages, components, and menus.

See Understanding Workflow Maps.

Step Three: Create Workflow Maps

Create the workflow maps comprising the steps, activities, and business processes required for your workflow, as determined in step one.

Use PeopleSoft Application Designer to create graphical maps that represent your business process. At this stage, you create maps only for the processes that are involved in the underlying application; you add PeopleSoft Workflow-specific elements to the maps when you define events and routings.

See Understanding Workflow Maps and Understanding Navigator Map Design.

Step Four: Define Roles and Role Users

Define the roles and the role users, including any Query roles required for your workflow.

To ensure that work flows to the correct person, you must determine who that person is. You can find the right person using either Query roles or user list roles.

See Understanding Roles and Users.

Step Five: Define Worklist Records

Create a record definition that will be used to store all of the application-specific information for the worklist.

The worklist record determines which fields of information the system stores for each work item, including the data needed to access the target page (the search keys for the page) and any additional information that you want to display in the worklist itself. Because different worklist entries can have different target pages and display data, you need separate worklist records for the different types of entries that will appear in the worklist.

See Understanding Worklist Records.

Step Six: Define Workflow Objects

You define the workflow application in this step. You enter each of the objects into a business process definition in Application Designer, as determined in step one.

You will define the events and routings that make up workflow. Events and routings are both objects in the workflow maps. To define these workflow objects, you add the icons to the map, linked to the step representing the page where the triggering event occurs.

See Understanding Events and Routings.

Step Seven: Define Event Triggers

Define the business rule in PeopleCode in the triggering application record definition. Workflow programs are defined in a record definition for one of the tables that the component accesses. They contain the business rules used to decide whether to trigger the business event. The PeopleCode detects when a business rule has been triggered and determines the appropriate action.

See Understanding Event Triggers.

Step Eight: Test

Test your workflow, or use the workflow monitoring tools in Workflow Administrator to validate worklist routing results.