Business Process Flow Management

This function enables you to create and manage business process flow (BPF) templates - also called process templates - and manage the processes created from these templates.

A process template is the specification of a single enterprise-wide business process, containing tasks that can span across the various modules of Business Planning and Consolidation. It defines the business processes that are presented to users as a prepackaged set of application tasks. For an additional level of control over the workflow, you can integrate work status rules.

Once you have completed a process template, you can create a process based on the template, in the Administration screen. A process represents an iteration of the enterprise-wide business process, which allows the user to see only the tasks relevant for that user, given his or her role and data access privileges.

Prerequisite

You must have the Manage BPFs task profile assigned to you in order to manage business process flows.

Features

The following functions are available to authorized users:

Function	More Information
Create new process templates	You can create a new process template on which to base processes, copy existing process templates, and modify existing templates. For more information, see Creating New Process Templates.
Validate process templates	When you create a new process template, the system automatically validates the template for completeness before saving the template. The result of this validation is shown in the Status column. A template can be Valid or Invalid. If it is invalid, you can revalidate it by selecting the template , and clicking Validate.
Unlock process templates	If the system automatically locks a template because you unexpectedly logged off while editing, you can unlock it by selecting the template and clicking Unlock. Note that you cannot unlock templates that are locked by other users. To find out who has locked a template, select the template and click Versions.
Deploy a template	If a template is not locked and has a status of Valid, you can deploy it so that it can be used for creating processes. Select the template, and click Deploy.
Copy a template and create new version	If you want to create a new template based on an existing template, select the template you want to copy and choose Copy. Once a template is deployed for creating processes, it can no longer be modified. To make changes to a deployed template, you can select the template and choose New Version.
View all templates and versions	If you select a template and choose Versions, the Template Versions window opens. The list contains all versions of the selected template. To view an obsoleted version of a template, select a template in this window and click View.
Archive process templates	You can archive process templates. When you archive a process template, all processes based on the template must be completed beforehand because they will also be archived.
Integrate external workflows with BPFs	You can integrate external workflows with BPC BPF processes to accommodate complicated planning processes. For more information, see External Process Integration.