IBM BUSINESS AUTOMATION WORKFLOW

Which business operations can be optimized:

Use automation to scale your digital business to boost productivity and revenue. With IBM® Cloud Pak for
Business Automation as a Service, you can scale operations to be more productive and competitive.
Digitization is changing the nature of work, and organizations must adapt to this change.

Automation is a key element of the digital transformation, and by automating your business operations you
can achieve significant increases in speed and accuracy, and reduce costs.

Automation streamlines functions to increase the amount and quality of work an organization can handle. It
is designed to improve employee productivity, enhance decision making, and help optimize systems. As a
result, automation is a worthy investment for practically all of your work processes.

The goal of digital automation is to move everyone in the organization closer to the expert level by giving
them enhanced capabilities and empowering them to use those capabilities more effectively.

Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service gives you the ability to apply automation to any style of
work, from rote, repetitive tasks, extracting data from unstructured content, to making policy-based
decisions that help ensure regulatory compliance. Business operations across industries can benefit from
automation for critical business processes by combining different forms of automation, such as workflow
management and business rules. To meet your individual organization’s needs, it is essential to select the
right place in your business to begin, starting with an entry point that meets your greatest need for
automation.

Use the following basic four-step workflow to move your business operations from manual to digitally
automated tasks.

Digitizing and automating business operations across the enterprise has these key areas:

Content
Workflow
Decisions

All of these areas exist in every organization and can benefit from the combined power of the digital
transformation and new capabilities for automation.
You must discover where your digital transformation journey can benefit most from automation.
When you have a good understanding of the processes where automation can be applied, it then becomes a
matter of picking the right program for the right job.
What is a process

A process is a set of related activities, along with supporting information such as data and content.
The activities can be part of a structured flow, or ad-hoc activities that are not part of a structured
flow.

The following diagram illustrates the main process artifacts and how they relate to one another.

Start event
Use to model the start of a process, a linked process, a subprocess, or an event subprocess. A
Start event is automatically included when you create a process. You can include multiple Start
events so that you can start the process more than one way. For more information, see Event
types.

Activities
An activity represents work to be done during the running of the process. For more information,
see Implementing the activities in a process.
Gateways
Represents a split or convergence of multiple execution paths. For more information, see
Converging and diverging flows.

Lanes
A container for the activities and events in a process. A lane usually groups activities that are
completed by members of a team.

Teams
You can assign a team whose members can start a process, or an instance owners team whose
members can work with the process at run time. For more information, see Assigning teams to a
process.

Subprocesses
A subprocess represents a collection of logically related steps contained within a parent process.
For more information, see Modeling, subprocesses.

Content
Your process might need documents that are stored in Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
folders. You can specify the folder that you use to manage these ECM documents.

User interfaces
Create user interfaces that a user sees while working with the process in Workplace. For more
information, see Creating user interfaces for processes.

Services
Services provide functions for a process. You can discover and use external services, such as
REST services, web services, or Java services in your process. For more information, see Service
types.

Events
Events in a process can be triggered by a due date passing, an exception, or an incoming message
from an external system. You can add events that can occur at the beginning, during, or at the end
of a process. Use events to track data, manage errors, and retrieve information about the execution
of your processes. For more information.

Ad hoc activities
An ad hoc activity is not part of the structured process; it is an activity that a business user can run
as needed. An ad hoc activity has no input wires and is started according to predefined
preconditions, rather than by a predefined process flow. Such activities can be required or optional,
and they can be defined as repeatable or to run at most once.
What is a case solution:

Solutions consist of case types, activities, steps, and other components. A solution is an application that case
workers use to process cases.

The following diagram illustrates the main case artifacts and how they relate to one another.

Solutions
A solution consists of one or more related case types that provide the documents, data, business processing,
and routing to the case workers. For example, a solution for a human resources department might include a
case type for new hires, a case type for retirement, and a case type for employee termination.

Case types
Case types define the activities, the necessary document types to support the activity, the activity steps, and
the roles that must complete those steps to solve a business problem. The case type also includes properties
that are displayed to case workers in views at run time. Case types make up a solution. A case is an instance
of a case type.

Document classes
Document classes help you to organize and classify the documents that belong to a case. You can provide
additional information about the documents by assigning properties to the document class.
For example, a document class might be a job application form.

Rules
A case type can contain rules. A rule determines the actions to take if particular conditions are met in a case.
After you create business rules for your case type, you can use the business rules in an activity to determine
process routing or to update case properties.

Views
A case type can contain views. A view specifies the properties that are displayed to a case worker for a case
type. For each case type, you can specify the properties that are displayed for the case summary and the
properties that are searchable. In addition, you can specify the one or more views for the properties that are
displayed in the Properties widgets that case workers use to complete cases and work items.
Activities
A case contains activities. An activity has one or more steps that must be completed to complete the activity.
For example,
An activity might be to review new hire applications. A case is not complete until all activities that are
marked as required during solution design, as well as all activities that have been started, are completed or
manually disabled. Each activity has roles that are associated with it. You can also implement an activity as a
business process.

Steps
Steps are the actions in a process that must be completed for an activity. For example, a step might be to
review a job application form. You assign the steps to roles or workgroups.

Roles
A role represents a specific business function. For example, a role might be an Applicant or Supervisor. You
assign users to roles. You use roles to access a particular activity. You define roles for the entire solution. You
then associate roles with activities.

Pages
A page contains the widgets that users of the solution application use to complete an activity. A page
consists of a layout, widget configurations, and the flow of events between widgets.

In-baskets
Each solution has a personal in-basket that contains Steps for activities that are assigned to a specific user.
The personal in-basket differs from the role in-basket.
The role in-basket contains work items that are assigned to a role, but not to a specific person. Work items in
a role in-basket can be accepted by any user to work on.