10 - Creating Events

Some decisions are made in response to business events. While DecisionsFirst does not model business events in detail, it does allow you to document your business events so you can cross-reference your decisions. For BigCo relevant events include Return Arrives at Warehouse and Bug Fix Issued. Let’s go ahead and create these two events. (Click on this link for a short video demonstration of creating events and other Business Context objects.)
To create an event you can check out the guidance here or just log in and use the Event button on the Create menu.


To create the first Event, enter the name “Return Arrives at Warehouse” and the description “The warehouse logs the arrival of a new return and this prompts various activities.#support #tutorial” Save and close. Repeat this to create the other with “Bug Fix Issued” as the name and “When development fix a problem with a product they issue a bug fixed event #support #tutorial” as the description. Save and close both events.

Tip: While some events always trigger the same response – kicking off a process for instance as Return Arrive at Warehouse likely triggers Process Return for BigCo – some require a decision to be made.

Reviewing these events for BigCo it is clear we are missing a decision – Determine which customers should be notified of a bug fix. Go ahead and add this decision using the Decision button in the Create menu. 

Search for "bug fix" in the search bar and open the decision to view the properties. Use the Jump menu on the left to go to the Application Context section and you will see an empty list of events in the Events section. To add the event link to the new decision, search for the event name within the Events field. You should see the event in the list of results. Select the event from the list to associate the event with the decision. Check out this guidance on Object Editing for more details.

If you like you can add this decision to the Support Decisions diagram and specify its dependencies too. Open the Support Decisions diagram and Search for "notified". Drag and drop the decision onto the diagram. Now use the search to find the Input Data and Knowledge Sources shown below and add requirements to fully specify how you would make this new decision. You should end up with something that looks like this:



Close the diagram.

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