Modeling processes

A process is the major unit of logic in IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM). It is the container for all components of a business process definition (BPD). Modeling a good process that matches your requirements is at the core of Process Designer.

Many different individuals from various organizations are involved in developing processes with IBM BPM. The overriding concern is to ensure that you are building the best possible solution for meeting the stated goals of your project. To ensure successful results, team members must work together to capture process requirements and iteratively develop the model and its implementations, as specified in the IBM Business Process Manager overview.

Creating a business process definition (BPD)
To model a process, you must create a business process definition (BPD). A BPD is a reusable model of a process that defines the common aspects of all runtime instances of that process model.
Building services
Use services to implement the activities in a business process definition (BPD). When a BPD starts and the tasks within it are invoked, services perform the required functions.
Modeling events
Events in IBM Business Process Manager can be triggered by a due date passing, an exception, or a incoming message from an external system. You can add events to your BPDs 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 BPDs.
Documenting development artifacts
As you develop your process application, you might want to capture information about the artifacts that you are creating. Each artifact in IBM Process Designer has a documentation field for this purpose. You can enter text or links to external resources such as web sites or attachments.
Using external implementations
You can create external implementations for activities that are handled by applications outside of IBM Business Process Manager. For example, you can model an activity that is run by a custom Eclipse RCP or Microsoft .NET application.
Integrating with web services, Java, and databases
You can configure IBM BPM processes to communicate with an external system to retrieve, update, or insert data. And, external applications can call into IBM BPM to initiate services. You can manage inbound and outbound communication with external systems using undercover agents, web services, and integration services.
Integrating BPDs with IBM Case Manager cases
To integrate with IBM Case Manager, you build an integration service and perform other key steps when you want to integrate a business process developed in IBM Process Designer with a case management case in IBM Case Manager.
Upgrading BPDs from V8.5.5 and earlier
You can upgrade business process definitions (BPDs) that you created in releases of IBM BPM V8.5.5 and earlier to use functions that were added in later releases, such as data change management for instance UIs.

Parent topic: Creating processes in IBM Process Designer