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.
Case management functions are only available if you have IBM BPM Advanced with the Basic Case Management feature installed.
To create a case, you identify the user activities that are needed to complete the case and then group those activities into a case. You identify the documents that are used and the teams of users that work on the activities. You also identify the conditions that are required to start and complete the case and activities. Finally, you create the user interface that case workers see in Process Portal.
The following diagram illustrates the main tasks and activities that are associated with building a case.
- Case management overview
IBM Business Process Manager is a case management system that simplifies the job of designing and building cases. It also provides a graphical user interface for case workers to manage cases. With IBM Business Process Manager, you design a case management application that is based on closely related cases and then deploy that solution into a production environment. Case workers can then complete work items that are associated with cases. - Designing a case
To design a case management application, identify what user activities are needed to accomplish the main user goal. Decide what business level activities and steps you need, and then group those activities and steps into a case. As you identify the content that is needed to complete the activities, decide who works on the content. Then, consider what does or does not need to happen to complete an activity. - Opening Case Designer from Process Center
You can configure process applications and toolkits so that users can open them in Case Designer from Process Center. - Creating a case type
A case type defines the activities that are needed to resolve a specific business problem. A case type also defines who works on these activities and the steps they take to resolve the problem. At run time, a business user works with a case, which is an instance of a case type. A case type also uses document types that define the documents that are required for the case. - Adding a case activity
An activity in a case is a discrete task that can be completed by a person or a system as part of that case. Typically a case has a number of activities. You add an activity in a case type and classify it as either is required or optional, and also define the order in which activities are performed by setting preconditions, and add implementation logic. - Creating a document type
Document types classify the documents that belong to a case. Document types provide order to the many kinds of documents that can occur in a case. You can configure a case to start when a document of a specified document type is filed into the IBM BPM content store. You can also set a precondition on an activity to start the activity when a document of a specified document type is filed in the IBM BPM content store - Creating case user interfaces
Create user interfaces that a user sees for the case instance in Process Portal. - Testing and debugging a case type
Play back your case type in the Inspector to test and debug your activities. - Services to support case management applications
You can create services to use with your case management applications. These services, which can do standard tasks in your case management applications, can be shared by all case types in a process application. - The IBM BPM content store
The IBM BPM content store is a CMIS-enabled embedded document repository that is used to store IBM BPM documents in IBM Business Process Manager Advanced version 8.5.5.0 or later. It supplants the document attachment feature that was used in earlier releases. The IBM BPM content store supports all Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) operations and most inbound events and you can use either Coaches or Heritage Coaches to work with IBM BPM documents in the content store. - Case artifacts and the IBM BPM content store
The IBM BPM content store contains the generated case folder and document definitions and the case artifacts.