SAPERION Blog

In Fortsetzung des Artikels SharePoint und SAPERION: S1 plus S2 ergibt S3 von Dr. Szpott über die Mehrwerte der Nutzung des SharePoint Servers in Verbindung mit dem SAPERION ECM können wir nun ein weitere S hinzufügen. Unser Partner Signavio, mit dem wir gemeinsam das BPM Round-Trip Engineering im letzten mit unserer Version 7 haben wahr werden lassen, hat nun ebenfalls eine Integration ihrer Process Editor Plattfrom in Sharepoint freigegeben.

Die Integration des Signavio Process Editor in SAPERION Workflow ermöglicht ein proffesionelles Modellieren von Prozessen in der BPMN-Notation und die anschließende Ausführung mit der SAPERION Workflow Enigne. Der Signavio Process Editor bietet eine Reihe weiterer interessanter Funktionen wie das kollaborative Modellieren von Aufgabenketten sowie deren Simulation, um Aussagen über Ressourcenverbräuche und Durchlaufzeiten zu gewinnen.

Die Integration des Signavio Process Editors in den SharePoint Server bietet nun sowohl (more…)

Here comes our eighth wish, because som workflow experiences show that there are further attributs missing in the BPMN 2.0 specification. Here is the general use case:

After Task A has been finished the fowolling Task B should be finished itself after a defined period of time otherwise the flow should go to Task C.

This feature is trivial and may fit in many cases, but it is not flexible enough especially in Case Management situation. Let´s have a look to the special use cases.

Escalation after a period of time

1. use case – user defines on the fly

Here the user must be able to define the period of time on the fly when he finishes Task A. On the workflow user interface a dialog (more…)

In dieser Woche ist inzwischen unser vierter Artikel über die tausender Marke der Lesungen gesprungen: Compliance ist keine Mode sondern hat eine lange Tradition. Er geht u.a. auf das bisher geringe Kontrollieren der Einhaltung von Regeln gerade im Mittelstand ein.

In der letzten Woche ist unser aktueller Dauerbrenner über die 6.000er Marke gesprungen: Ich habe ihn, meinen neuen Personalausweis (zumindest Test-…). 3.500 Lesungen allein in den letzten 30 Tagen. Hier habe ich im Februar über erste Tests mit meinem Testausweis geschrieben. Ab dem 1. des aktuellen Monats kann man sich den neuen Personalausweis bestellen. Wer dazu in Google nach “Kartenlesegerät Personalausweis” sucht, (more…)

Born in the beginning of this millennium BPMN – Business Process Modeling and Notation – became the world wide standard for graphical process modeling in the last two years. The new Version 2.0 which will be released in near time begins to close the gap in the BPM Round-Trip Engineering.  What has been missed so far? And why is it only the beginning?Let´s see.

BPMN has specified only the look & feel of all the elements to be used to document structured processes with pools, lanes, activities, events, sequence and message flows and such stuff, but not how to store them for interchange the models between applications of different vendors and different goals as there are modeling, analyses, simulation or execution.

Yes, there was an alternative to store the graphical models (more…)

Here is our fifth wish in respect to missing attributes of an human task. Depending on the culture of a company or the importance of a workflow item the user may be or not possible to call several functions, e.g.:

• put the task into the resubmission tray until a defined date
• show the process history for checking the prior performers may be to call one (more…)

Our next wish belongs a simple functionality, but helps again to reduce programming effort and a source of error. Working on business cases there is often the situation that a task is addressed to an organisational unit and somebody takes the task over. The flow goes on, but due to some missing things it may come back to that special task. And to avoid that somebody else needs the setup-time again the former performer should be addressed again to rework the task. To summarize: first time address the task to  a group afterwards to the first performer.

We have solved this with an attribute named remember receiver which is flagged for that special task as shown in the following graphic. (more…)

Nachdem die Entscheidung bekanntgegeben wurde, dass die DMS EXPO mit der IT & Business in diesem Jahr gemeinsam stattfindet, gingen die Diskussionen bei uns los:
- Gehen wir hin?
- Welche Messe ist besser für uns – die DMS aus Tradition oder doch die IT & Business?
- Eigener Stand oder sich mit jemand zusammen tun?

Allerdings sind wir nicht die einzigen, die diese Fragen zu klären hatte. So klingelte auch ab und zu mal ein Mitbewerber bei mir durch, um zu fragen, was wir denn jetzt machen.

Und was machen wir jetzt? – Da wir sowohl Themen für die eine wie auch für die andere Messe haben, sind wir dieses Jahr gleich doppelt vom 26. bis 28. Oktober in Stuttgart vertreten. (more…)

BPMN example to explane the distribution challenge

Here comes our third wish (first and second one) for the human-centric process behavior missed in BPMN 2.0. In BPMN you can place an human task into a lane, which is named e.g. Sales. During runtime somebody of the organisational unit Sales (attribute = performer) should do the work. In reality there are several possibilities to distribute.

(more…)

BPMN example for a decision via gateway

In every process there are decision points. Conditions can be proved by the process engine by evaluating formulars defined on conditional sequence flows. So the corresponding parameters must be set within processing the task before (diagramm taken from discussion post of Keith Swenson).

We have learned that in the most cases (more…)

In many cases processes follow complex rules. So the graphical structure of a process may me simple. But to decide who should take over a task can be very different. I will show this behavior on the basis of a typical invoice approval process and how to model it in BPMN.

BPMN allows to use swimlanes to define in which department a task should be processed. So for the invoice approval the process will start in the accounting to register the invoice data in the ERP system. Depending on the amount of money, the cost center and the class of the supplier there may be one, two or in some cases three approval steps (the third approval is not shown in the following diagram to simplify):

(more…)