Processes

Processes represent a defined business process within the organization. Such a process may or may not be modeled explicitly outside of DecisionsFirst Modeler.

When a Process is created or edited, the basic details of a process are displayed at the top of the edit column

  • A unique name for the process that should be the same as the one used in any external model.
  • A rich text description of the process, often copied from the external model if there is one.

At a basic level we want to know which decisions are involved in which processes so there is a list of Decisions that must be made if the process is to complete, or that MAY need to be made so the process can complete. There is no order to this list and decisions can be dragged into the list or deleted from the list by clicking on the x.
Sometimes it is helpful to have more detail about the Process available in DecisionsFirst Modeler. The Process Design section includes a list of Decision Points specified for the process. These are the tasks within the process that require decisions to be made. New decision points can be added using the + symbol. For each decision point you can

  • Click on the row and specify a name. This should match the task name in your process design.
  • Drag and drop input data from the search to show what information is available at this point in the process
  • Drag and drop decisions to show which decision or decisions must be made as part of a particular decision task.
  • In addition, if you have saved your process design as a graphic file (PNG or JPG), you can load up a Process Map to show users of DecisionsFirst Modeler what the whole process looks like.

In many organizations processes are going to be managed in a piece of software. The external Information section allows you to specify

  • A URL at which the process can be viewed, a read-only location. The view button will open this URL in your browser.
  • A URL at which the process can be edited by a user with the right permission. The edit button will open this URL (and depending on the URL type this may cause a piece of locally installed software to launch).
  • If the process is Managed Externally then this should be noted and the
  • External ID specified as well for reference.

All objects can have Comments.