Building process applications
In IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM), process applications are the containers for business processes and cases 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 process definitions (BPDs) or cases 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.
- Business process management and case management
Business process management and case management are two approaches to build a process. The type of business situation you are addressing determines which approach you use.Case management functions are only available if you have IBM BPM Advanced with the Basic Case Management feature installed. - Getting started with IBM Process Designer
Process Designer is an easy-to-use graphics-oriented tool that enables you to model and implement your business processes and easily demonstrate process design and functionality during development efforts. This overview describes how to begin using all of the tools that are available with Process Designer. - Creating new process applications
When you create a new process application, you provide a name, acronym, and optional description of the process application. - Creating a process application from a WebSphere Business Modeler process
You can import business processes from WebSphere Business Modeler to Process Designer. - Creating processes in IBM Process Designer
Create processes in Process Designer that represent the processes in your company. When you run your processes inside Process Designer, you can analyze and simulate them in order to optimize your business activity. 
Building cases
A case is a project that starts and finishes over time to resolve a problem. The problem can involve a claim or a request or a proposal and be supplemented by many documents and records relevant to the case. A case usually involves multiple people from inside and outside of an organization. These people often have a relationship to each other. For example, a customer with a problem and a corporate support representative who solves the problem for the customer.- 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. - 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 for business processes
In IBM Business Process Manager, human services provide the logic and user interface through which users can view and interact with business processes, cases, data or process instances. - 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
- Testing and debugging process applications
- 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. - Troubleshooting Process Designer and Process Center connectivity
Resolve problems starting Process Designer, for example during login, by using various techniques such as correcting invalid connection information or logging errors that are captured with log4J or java.util.logging.