Process Designer Tailoring Best Practice Guide

Basic concepts

Service Management Process Designer is a graphical interface that enables you to develop the workflows that control the flow of a single record throughout its lifecycle within Service Manager.

Process Designer enables you to perform the following tasks without being an expert in RAD programming:

• Graphically create and update a workflow
• Define a workflow process in a graphical editor
• Create business rules to drive the workflow logic in a user-friendly interface
• Model complex processes that require branching and looping
• Lower the Total Cost of Ownership of Service Manager by enabling an intuitive and simplified configuration
• Simplify future upgrades by enabling standardization and clarity of business logic

Process Designer includes the following components:

• Workflow designer

  A graphic interface used to design and update a workflow

• Rules editor

  Used to create rules to enforce business logic in workflows and in forms

• Security model

  Provides a common role-based security model

• Task Planner

  A graphical interface used to design and update planned tasks

A workflow is a collection of phases, and the transitions between those phases. Each phase represents the current state of the workflow and is linked to a form for data capture.

Transitions

Transitions can connect phases in any manner to create a workflow that includes many branches and loops back to previous phases. Transitions can be triggered manually, automatically, or by default. A manual transition requires the workflow user to make a manual decision to move to the next workflow phase. An automatic transition moves the workflow to another phase based on data in the workflow record. A default transition is a special case that moves the workflow automatically, when no other automatic transition condition applies.

Rule sets

The rules editor enables administrators (such as business process owners, implementers, and developers) to add or remove the out-of-box rules and actions of a workflow to match particular business requirements. You can group individual rules into a rule set to allow their re-use within the process. You can configure a rule set to run when certain events occur, such as when a record is saved or updated. Rules can also be set up to run when a workflow transition occurs.

Actions

You can also configure rules as actions, which allows operators to run rules on demand rather than wait for specific events in the workflow. When an operator initiates an action, the system runs the rule sets that are associated with that phase of the workflow.

The Condition Editor

The Condition Editor enables you to apply conditions to rules, form conditions, actions, alert and approval in phases, and the conditional Task Planner. When a condition is met, the rule or action runs. You can also edit conditions by using the Condition Editor.

The Process Designer security model

The Process Designer security model provides a consistent method to assign permissions to users across all areas of the system. You can use the security model to configure out-of-box rights for a specific role within an area. The security model also provides standardized methods to manage user rights.

Service Manager Codeless modules

Process Designer features are implemented in the Knowledge Management, Change Management, Request Fulfillment, Service Level Management, and Help Desk (comprised of Service Desk, Incident Management, and Problem Management) modules, as well as Time Period and Survey Integration.

To access the Process Designer features from the system navigator, click Tailoring > Process Designer.

A typical Process Designer flow broadly comprises the following major tasks:

• Enforce business logic on traditional Service Manager forms by creating rule sets with rules that use out-of-box rule types
• Build a process flow by creating a workflow with phases and transitions
• Implementing your business process by associating forms, rule sets, approvals, and alerts in workflow phases and transitions.