Building process applications

In IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM), process applications are the containers for business processes that are created in IBM Process Designer.

You can either create process applications in Process Center or export and import process applications into Process Center. After a process application is created or imported, it is stored and listed in the Process Center repository. You open process applications in Process Designer where you can create and edit the business processes within those process applications.

For information about designing high-performing IBM Business Process Manager solutions, see the following publications:

For designing processes, see Chapter 5: Design considerations and patterns in Business Process Management Design Guide: Using IBM Business Process Manager.
For best practices, see Chapter 2: Architecture best practices and Chapter 3: Development best practices in IBM Business Process Manager V8.5 Performance Tuning and Best Practices.
For an overview of critical performance-related information, see IBM Business Process Manager V8.5 Performance Tuning.

The following high-level diagram illustrates the basic tasks and activities that are typically associated with building a process application.

Interactive high-level flow diagram that illustrates the tasks that are associated with
building a process application. Click a box for more information, or shift-click to open a new
browser.

A comparison of processes and business process definitions (BPDs)
You can create processes in two ways in IBM Process Designer. You can create processes in the web Process Designer or BPDs in the desktop Process Designer. Both processes and BPDs have the same underlying definition and they are both the same at run time. Learn about the differences.
Process Designer
To model your process, you can use the newer web Process Designer in a browser or the traditional Process Designer on your desktop.
Creating process applications
When you create a process application, you provide a name, acronym, and optional description of the process application.
Creating 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.
Running and debugging processes and services in the web Inspector
Authoring processes is an iterative process that can involve several playback sessions. You can run, test and debug your processes and services in the web Process Designer Inspector.
Creating a team
A team is a group of users that perform similar tasks, and consists of a set of members and a team of managers. Teams are used to manage the tasks that users can perform in Process Portal. Because any team can be added as the manager of another team, you can flexibly define your organization's management structure.
Integrating services in the web Process Designer
Services provide functions for a business process, which itself is a sequence of services. You can discover and use external services in web Process Designer. You can also expose IBM BPM applications so that they can be launched by a web service.
Creating relationships between process instances
You can create relationships between process instances so that all authorized Process Portal users can view all the information for their cases or processes, such as all the cases for a particular client or similar cases in a particular region. You can also create dependencies between process instances so that a process instance cannot complete until all the instances that it depends on are completed.
Business objects and variables
In Process Designer, variables capture the business data that is used by activities in a business process definition or by steps in services such as integration services or human services.
Creating user interfaces
In IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM), human services provide the logic and user interface through which users can view and interact with business processes, data or process instances.
Creating themes
You can create a theme to provide common styling to a set of coach views.
Versioning process applications
Versioning provides the ability for the runtime environment to identify snapshots in the lifecycle of a process application, and to be able to concurrently run multiple snapshots on a process server.
Enabling document support
Enabling processes for tracking and reporting
IBM Business Process Manager provides ways to collect and consume process performance information. To take advantage of this information, you enable to design your processes to make them trackable.
Designing process interactions for business users
After you deploy a business process definition that you have built in Process Designer to the Process Portal, a business user might interact with it in a number of ways. The user might be the one to launch the process, or the user might be assigned individual activities in the process.
Modeling business process definitions (deprecated)
A business process definition (BPD) is a major unit of logic in IBM Business Process Manager (BPM). You create BPDs in the desktop Process Designer (deprecated).
Globalization
To ensure that applications can be used in multiple geographical locations and cultures, globalization support is built in through appropriate design and implementation of systems, software, and procedures. IBM Business Process Manager provides globalization support for single- and multi-byte character sets and for bidirectional transformation including contextual support, support for text layout transformation, and calendar support for Hebrew and Hijri.