Building Your Ultimus V8 Process Library Quickly

Building and deploying your first business process is a great experience.  Inevitably, as soon as the first business process is complete, you will have pressure to start your second.  When this time comes, as a best practice, you should consider how much construction of your first process you can reuse for your new process.  The ability to reuse process artifacts not only saves you time and effort, but also provides consistency across processes for reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) purposes.  One example of process reusability is the data library that supports the business process.

For instance, if your first business process was a HR process where you captured information pertaining to your company employees,most likely, this business process would contain data elements such as Employee Name, Address, and Social Security Number (SSN).  This process will also include accounting fields such as Salary and Hire Date.  If your next business process also includes adding employee information, recreating the same data fields in the new process means duplicating the work from your first process.  More efficient approaches to building your new process would be to either:

• Create an external data library detailing your employees and importing that into your business process

• Exporting the data library from your first process and importing it into your second

By utilizing a consistent data library across all of your processes, reporting on your business processes becomes a fluid and easy task.  For example, if you plan on reporting across all of Sales Order processes to capture a field such as Order Total, when your processes are built on the same data library (where the field in this library is called Order_Total), then reporting on these processes is easy.  You can be assured that the "Order Total" amounts you are retrieving from each process have the same inherent definition.

 

Have you thought about creating a unified data library for your business processes?  If not, how much time are you spending organizing and collecting the data in your business processes?

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus