About Business Flows
A business flow is a logical grouping of transaction documents which are interconnected to each other by the sequence of events.
A business flow consists of a series of steps, where each step represents exchange of transaction documents between the trading partners. For an organization, the steps in a business flow for common supply chain operations (procurement, manufacturing etc) remain the same.
Consider a typical procurement business flow:
Here, the steps when buying material A and material B will remain same. The only difference would be the item being purchased, and the trading partners involved. Even the document types associated for each step remains the same, they will differ only with respect to their contents and values.
Intelligent Track and Trace enables you to define business flow templates, which are then used to create business flow instances. Using the graphical interface you can:
- Define the business steps for a template, where each business step represents a transaction.
- Identify the associated document type. The document types are the same that you have defined in Create a New Document Type
- Define the placeholders for the trading partners involved, and the role of each trading partner ( for example, buyer, seller etc)
- Specify who would be the business document submitters for each step. There can be multiple submitters in a step.
- Logically sequence the business steps in the order of their occurrence. Note that the sequence is not enforced at runtime. Documents can arrive into the network in any order and the application orders them correctly according to the sequence defined in the flow template.
You can now use this template to create individual business flow instances for procuring Material A, Material B and Material C.
For information on business flows, see About Business Flows.