Before Using uDesigner

This guide assumes that you and your company, along with the help of Oracle Consulting Services group, have completed a detailed "top-down" analysis of your business goals and needs.

Top-Down Analysis

A top-down analysis of your business goals means that you have:

  1. Defined the goal of each of your business processes and designed the organization of your data, typically into shells and managers.
  2. Outlined the workflow each business process should follow.

    This outline should help you see where you need a sub-workflow or a conditional routing, and clarify the soundness of the business process before you solidify it.

  3. Translated this workflow into one that will be usable in Unifier.

    This will help you decide on the forms that will be necessary for each step in the process. Knowing what forms you will need at each step and what fields should be on each form will make designing the rest of the business process easier and more efficient.

  4. Gained a thorough understanding of the data flow in your company so that you know where data from one business process must flow into another business process.
  5. Determined the statuses each form should be in at every step in the workflow, for example, open, closed, pending, or waiting for approval.
  6. Designed the forms you need to accompany the workflow, for example purchase orders, invoice approvals, document transmittals, or asset forms, including all the fields that should be on these forms.

    This should help you organize the data you want for upper and detail forms, and help you determine exactly how the form will be used in the workflow.

  7. Determined the data elements that will support these fields, and how the data will be stored.

After you have completed this analysis and design, you will then be ready to create the business processes, shells, or managers with uDesigner.

Bottom-Up Design

In uDesigner, you will be creating business processes, shells, or managers from the bottom up; that is, you will be creating each piece of the business process, beginning with elemental details:

Data definitions

To support how data is entered and stored

Data elements

To create the fields on the forms

Statuses

For records, line items, and assets to indicate their condition or state during their life cycle in Unifier

Attribute or detail forms

To launch the Unifier managers (Asset, Cost, Document, and so on) and collect information about costs, funds, documents, schedule activities, resources, plans, assets, facilities, and shells that is not relevant to the steps in a workflow

Forms

For users to fill out

Workflows

To specify how a business process should proceed, from start to finish

Logs

To contain all the records that were created in Unifier during runtime

For more detailed information on these components, see Business Processes Overview.


Last Published Monday, June 3, 2024