Processes

General Description

A process can be defined as a specific order of events and activities that aim for a certain goal. These events and activities have strictly defined inputs and outputs and are connected in a process and eventually produce a value.

To model a process means to model the event that makes the process start, the activities that are performed, the decisions that are taken and the final result of the process flow. Modeling of a process is done to see what actually happens during a process, who does what and when, how a goal is achieved, and what improvements can be done for the process to perform better. Modeling goes further when it has to describe not only the standard process' life cycle, but also the exceptions that may occur. Professionals with different scopes of interest create process models aiming for different objectives.

SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management (BPM) enables you to model processes with different scope and granularity, using different modeling approaches. You use the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio as a tool for process modeling. You use the Process Modeling perspective in the Developer Studio to sketch processes and the Process Development perspective to make the processes executable.

Processes in BPM

The process composer adopts the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to enable easy and intuitive modeling of end-to-end business process. You use the defined in the BPMN specification flow objects, connecting objects, artifacts and swimlanes to create a business process model.

Modeling in the process composer allows you to create a more than just a descriptive model of a standard business process, but also provides capabilities for you to foresee and model possible exceptions. What is more, you can also model exceptions handling to visualize how the process branches after an exception has occurred.

Apart from creating a process model, the process composer allows you to define the business logic behind it, which makes the process model executable. To do that, the process composer integrates the SAP-specific development and standard project development allowing the consumption of Web services, the usage of Web Dynpro for Java (WDJ), Web Dynpro for ABAP (WDA) and Visual Composer (VC) user interfaces (UI), the usage of Adobe offline forms and the usage of rules and functions in process modeling. Web services assigned to process model automated activities allow a step in the process modeled using an automated activity to be executed through starting a Web service. WDJ, WDA, VC UIs and Adobe offline forms assigned to tasks that are modeled as human activities enable a human to interact with the process and execute tasks. Rules and functions provide strong capabilities regarding decision making and transformation of data required in the process model.

Another key feature of the process composer is that all Web services, UIs, tasks and rules and functions are reusable units. You can use all of them in different projects and models, which enhances flexible process modeling. What is more, you can develop custom reusable units corresponding to your business needs.

Using the process composer you model different processes based on different scenarios. For example, you can model a business trip approval scenario, a leave request approval scenario, a goods delivery scenario and so on.